What are you up to this weekend? If the answer isn?t ?I?m going poking round lots of quirky London buildings, enjoying Open House for all I?m worth and whooping with delight at all the random facts I glean? then we?ve just lost a little respect for you.

(Unless, of course, you?re going to a funeral, or setting off on holiday or something like that. We really don?t mean to suggest that you?re an uncultured turd if you have a good excuse like that. But the rest of you, loafing around in bed, perhaps watching a bit of association football or bumming about avoiding housework. NO! Get off your lazy arses, get into town and start learning about this incredible city we live in.)

We?ve already rounded up our picks for the two-day event. But there are 600 others to choose from. Every London borough plus the City have their own participating venues. Even the lamest, Hillingdon, has ten buildings for you to discover (although four of them are churches and one is a barn, but hey - or hay).

Top tips
1. Avoid the City like the plague didn?t. Queues are longest here and you?ll fit less in.
2. If you?re heart is set on the Square Mile, try a few of the churches. Most open their doors over the weekend and are a pleasant alternative to waiting outside a guild hall for half an hour.
3. Westminster Hall and Portcullis House usually have long queues, but these quickly go down. However, this year it looks like the connect tunnel is out of bounds, so this may change.
4. Don?t pay for a booklet. Head to your local main library and pick one up for free.
5. Whenever you?re in earshot of an organiser, mutter to your companion(s) ?This is great, but I wish they?d do it twice a year?. This event is far too good to have to wait so long.

Competition on a whim
Take a camera, take some pictures and add them to the Londonist Flickr group (tag them Londonist and they find their own way there). We'll show off the weirdest and wonderfulest over the next week and will send an imaginary prize to the person with the best snap.

Image taken from the Open House website. Which we think is fair dibs seeing as we're promoting their event AND they never sent us their Open House Bulletin magazine, despite the fact that we parted with £16 for the privilege, and chased by email and never heard anything back. The rotters. And it's not even a particularly interesting image we've nicked from them anyhow. The green hue makes it look like those people are walking through an Ionic fish tank.

Just in case you haven't yet turned on the tv, a radio, glanced at a newspaper and this is the first internet page you've opened since yesterday, it's true. The might Led Zeppelin are reforming for a one off benefit show in aid of Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic records who signed them way back at a time when dinosaurs really did rule the earth and died last year.

Tickets to the November 26 gig at the O2 Arena are £125 a head, limited to two per person and will be assigned by ballot. Registration closes on Monday and if you're feeling flush and fancy a chance then you can try getting on to the website. Good luck and may the Norse Gods be with you because it's easier getting a Glastonbury ticket right now.

Page, Plant and Jones will be joined by Jason Bonham on drums, son of their late tub-thumper, plus some other Atlantic acts (Foreigner, Pete Townsend, Bill Wyman and, erm, Paolo Nutini) and all proceeds will go to the Ahmet Ertegun Education Fund, which pays for university scholarships in the UK, US and Turkey.

In their ten years together the Zep (as they're known to just about everyone) recorded eight proper albums, toured the world in a jumbo, wrote the Stairway song and invented backwards messaging, sold their souls to Satan, drank rivers of alcohol and took drugs that don't even exist any more. They wrote the theme to Top Of The Pops, gave birth to Spinal Tap, deflowered more virgins than the East European porn industry, and did bad things to groupies with large fish. They wore tighter pants than the lass out of Aeon Flux and basically out-rocked the wiblesome antics of any of today's rebel rousers.

The show will no doubt go on to be the most momentous gig of all time.

Image from Dunechaser's flickr photostream

The International Workshop Festival has been rumbling away in the city since 28 August, allowing the bold and brave to take part in workshops and experiments in performing arts with specially invited artists and practitioners. As the festival draws to a close, a curious couple of performers and experiments have cropped up on our radar. Anyone willing to take part is definitely a friend of ours, and we want to hear from you what participation turns out to be like...

Artists Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle are camping out at Chelsea Theatre from Wednesday 19 to Saturday 22 September to explore, with help from the public, love as art. The Love Art Lab is no simple day long workshop of improvisation, discussion and regular tea breaks. Oh no. The Love Art Lab is a seven year project by this duo and their current work for Year Three is coming to Chelsea in a big, bold and beautiful way.

Elizabeth Stephens is a multi-media artist and professor "sexy dyke playboy" and Annie Sprinkle is a former prostitute, porn actress and pin-up model, now a performance artist and writer. The workshop they will run as part of the International Workshop Festival and part of The Love Art Lab is Extreme Kissing on Saturday 22 September:

Stephens and Sprinkle will lead this unique and special workshop exploring kissing as conversation, as political intervention, as altered state, as erotic meditation and as performance art. Bring a buddy to kiss for two hours straight - a friend, lover, or any willing collaborator. Or come solo and take a chance that you will find such a person at the workshop, or even out on King?s Road.

The first hour of the workshop will be in the theatre where you?ll receive instruction, and we?ll set our intentions. Then Stephens, Sprinkle, and all participants will emerge onto the Kings Road for a two-hour-long public Kiss-in. The last half hour will be back at the theatre for feedback and closing. (This can make you feel highly euphoric, so don't plan to drive right after the kiss.)

There is also a performance by the pair on Wednesday 19 to Saturday 22 September called EXPOSED: Experiments in Love, Sex, Death, and Art which will be a unique performance about their relationship, queer weddings, art, sex and aging.

Experimenting with love - what's not to love about it?

The Love Art Lab at Chelsea Theatre, Wednesday 19 to Saturday 22 September. For more information about the workshops and the performances, go to the Chelsea Theatre website here. For more information about the artists and The Love Art Lab go to the website here.

Image by Julian Cash

The Scala was filled with bands on Monday night and spurred on by a desire to see the mighty Architecture in Helsinki, we went to check them out. First up were The Wave Pictures- three local guys with a couple of guitars and a kit. Thoroughly affable chaps, all of them: the sort your Mum would like until you broke the unfortunate 'he's a drummer in a band?' news. Guitarist/vocalist Dave Tattersall easily warms up the room with cheeky chit-chat: quite in contrast to his yawling vocals which are reminiscent of Ian McCulloch or Brett Anderson.

Sadly, like the tenth spoonful of Weetabix, later songs in the set become drearily predictable. Solid musicianship all round is marred by an irritating habit of verse/chorus/verse/chorus/loud-and-uninspiring guitar solo; a sequence we like to refer to as A-B-A-B-owww! On the plus side their lyrics are sublime insanity: "Marmalade is marmalade and a statue is a statue. A statue of marmalade is a statute but it isn't marmalade." At first we're wondering if we heard it right, but we're soon crooning along with rest of the audience to these quiet words of genius. With their recent signing to Moshi Moshi they're definitely ones to watch.

Up next was Canadian Caribou, who before he and the band play the first note we had pegged as mild-mannered electronic indie folks. However the temptations of amp stacks and J-array speakers are clearly too much: the floor is pumping and the sound engineer is clearly in love with the drums and bass because that's all we can hear. Too bad there are two kits, meaning lyrics and keys are nearly inaudible in the battle of the cymbals, whilst the guitarists hang limply in the background. Nuance and texture there ain't.

Whilst Caribou are big on volume, AiH are big on personality: each of the six band members has their ego turned up to 11, keeping things interesting by effortlessly switching instruments and leaping around the stage looking like a giant polyphonic advert for skinny jeans.

Inspired performances including "Debbie" are tight, flawless and full of energy, but other songs at times feel flabby and eccentric, and when the band downs instruments for a cute 2-minute champagne break to the sound of "PM Dawn", the audience isn't entirely sure they've earned it. And if they have, they could've chosen a better interlude song.

Happily they end the show on a high note. Having confessed to being too old and jaded to bother with the traditional encore stage-shuffle they dive straight in to their finishing number; the ridiculously catchy "Heart it Races". Days later we're still singing "Boom dadadadadada boom dada dada".

Words by Dan Govan.

Fancy a gig with a difference? Friday night's alright for fighting zombies, as zombiecore band Send More Paramedics are playing London tonight, and on the menu is braaaaaains, braaaaains and more braaaains.

Somewhere between 'horrorcore' punk band the Misfits (as lead singer B'Hellmouth said:"the Misfits, they are the Godfathers of Horrorpunk, they invented it, we're just re-hashing what they did really. Apart from the fact that we're actually dead of course. That's the difference") and 80s-style thrash metal, SMP's mission involves converting the unwary to the zombie cause, by any means necessary. And tonight might be the last chance to see them: the band is breaking up after the culmination of this tour, and going their separate brain-eating ways. We can't help thinking they're missing a trick by not breaking up on Hallowe'en, but never mind.

London has seen its own fair share of zombies recently, so if you've caught the flesh-eating bug, we highly recommend you shuffle on down to this gig.

Send More Paramedics, doors 7pm, Carling Academy Islington, tickets £7

Autumn is settling in nicely in London and Chinatown is getting ready to celebrate. The Autumn Moon Festival is exactly what it sounds like: it is a celebration of autumn harvest, the changing of the seasons and, conveniently, is the time of year when the moon is particularly big and visible. This lends itself well to rolling out the many Chinese myths and legends about the moon and the Autumn Moon Festival is a time for hearing these stories, eating or avoiding the highly divisive moon cakes (it's a lump of sticky sweet bean paste with a dried, salted egg yolk "surprise" in the middle - what side of the fence do you sit on?) and getting together with family for feasting before winter sets in.

Soho Theatre being so close to Chinatown can't help but get involved and a magical walkabout, lantern-lit performance is planned for next week to coincide with the official dates of the Autumn Moon Festival. Moonwalking In Chinatown involves professional theatre folk and volunteers from the local community taking audiences around the streets of Soho, weaving a tale as they walk about three generations of Chinese Londoners crossing paths one night in Chinatown. Rabbits, karaoke and a woman who lives on the moon will feature prominently. A cameo appearance by Michael Jackson is highly unlikely.

Moonwalking In Chinatown, a walkabout performance starting at Soho Theatre, Wednesday 19 September to Saturday 29 September. For more information and to book tickets, go to the Soho Theatre website here.

Naomi Klein, in conversation with Madeleine Bunting
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 13th September 2007

"I am not a conspiracy theorist", insists Naomi Klein. Twice, in quick succession. Followed each time by a nervous laugh; a telling laugh.

We are in the spacious surroundings of the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank, where Canadian journalist and activist Klein, whose 2000 book No Logo became a minor phenomenon in the halcyon days between the Seattle riots and 9/11, is promoting her new effort. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism examines how Western governments (for which read, principally, the United States) have become dab hands at exploiting and (in some cases creating) political and economic shocks for the greater good of Mammon.

First though, we sat through a short, and rather silly, piece of agit-prop cinema, scripted by Klein and Alfonso Cuaron and directed by the latter's son, whose hyper-kinetic editing style revelled in putting the 'shock and awe' trope into MTV-style filmic reality. Through a series of hard-hitting graphics and flashed-up, messages (culled, apparently, from CIA interrogation manuals), a sombre voiceover told the heinous tale of unfettered capitalism and its wild rampage across society's most vulnerable. Villain of the piece? None other than bespectacled economist Milton Friedman, who, in an unintentionally humorous montage, is shown posing beside a Who's Who of sinister right-wing leaders: Pinochet, Thatcher, Reagan, Bush.

As the credits rolled, Klein began her talk, which got off to a faltering start as she opened with a gushing list of thanks that seemed to go on almost as long as the film itself. Eventually, the talk began, and Klein gave an overview of how the book had come about. She described her recollections, as a young girl in the 1970s, of the news that CIA-sponsored psychological tests, under the aegis of Ewen Cameron, had been conducted during the Fifties at McGill University in her native Montreal.

The aim of these sinister experiments was to reduce the unwitting patients into a state of childlike catatonia, a tabula rasa upon which a new personality could be moulded. Klein identifies these techniques with the 'shock and awe' that Donald Rumsfeld famously promised would be meted out to Iraq, and she formulated the 'Shock Doctrine': namely, that by combing both physical and economic shock to a country, governments have been successfully attempting to reduce entire populations into the same psychologically raw mulch that the McGill experiments did, and thus softening the populace for new terms of economic makeup ? such as privatisation of mass industry and foreign ownership of key state assets.

To whit: the Chilean coup of 1973, the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions a decade later, the introduction of laissez-faire corporatism in post-Soviet Russia, and ? most recently and most damningly ? the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

It sounds convincing, until Klein starts relying on a number of spurious examples. Citing Thatcher's invasion of the Falklands in 1982 as creating the 'shock' necessary to push through her more radical privatisation agenda is one thing, but suggesting that ? without the war ? Labour would have won the next year's election is ridiculous, as anybody who recalls the 'longest suicide note in history' would agree.

As for the 'looting' of Russia by the West in 1993, with Jeffrey Sachs sent into Moscow as a special adviser, was this really an example of Western manipulation? If so, how exactly did the West benefit? Fifteen years on, the vast amount of the wealth of the former Soviet state remains firmly in the hands of Russians, who are bossing the supposed overseer Europe both financially (Gazprom and Roman Abramovich) and militarily (the resurgent Russian aggression under Vladimir Putin).

On Iraq, Klein seems on sturdier ground. The manner in which Paul Bremer tore the country's nascent institutions apart, and allowed American companies to bid, unchallenged, for contracts on the rebuilding of Iraq's infrastructure, would seem to fit perfectly the doctrine at the heart of her book. The fact that, in Iraq, contractors vastly outweigh military personnel is an indictment of modern warfare as a profitable business model. And the correlation between the McGill experiments, and the torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, was instrumental in the book's formulation. Yet it wasn't long before the subject of oil came up, and Klein dutifully informed us that oil was indeed the sole aim of the Iraq war Yet as numerous commentators have noted, the gains from oil thus far have been minimal, and judging by the vehemence with which Iraqis view the black stuff as their birthright, it is unlikely that the benefits to Western economies will be felt any time soon.

Anti-Friedmanite screeds are hardly rare, yet this one seems to go one step further in assigning to his nefarious hand the entire economic path of the modern world. While his tutorship of the 'Chicago Boys' who ran Chile's economy under Pinochet is well-documented, and his influence in Britain and the Americas in the 1980s soberly acknowledged, can the late economist really be the sinister controller Klein depicts? What about the rise of India and China, whose policies are hardly textbook examples of Freidmanite policies? It's difficult to know just what Klein ascribes to the rise of these inchoate Asian superpowers, and one hopes it is a subject she covers in the book.

In interviews, Klein has stated that she wanted to reach out beyond the typical student activist niche that No Logo touched. Certainly, one way of doing so is by pricing them out ? the £12 tickets had, judging by the audience, been snapped up by the liberal-left dinner partying crowd so skewered by the likes of Nick Cohen. Hence the Q&A session that followed remained milquetoast and reverent, although one cheeky question ? what (if anything) does Klein like about capitalism? ? drew appreciative laughter and appeared to stump her, as she jokingly cited her knee-high boots in response.

While raising some interesting points, the talk left far too many questions unanswered to truly convince. Without reading the book it's difficult to gauge how much of the shock doctrine is flawed thinking, and how much was just a natural result of trying to cram the work of a 600-page tome into an hour-long lecture. Judging by the wide coverage The Shock Doctrine has received in the press, it's likely the conversation is only just beginning. Just don't call it a conspiracy theory.

By Dean Nicholas

Taking it's etymology from the triathlon but spinning it towards the event's beneficiaries - the trees - charity Trees for Cities will be raising money in a tripartite manner:

1. A 5k run for registered tree-athletes - sponsor/donate here
2. An urban "tree wish" for each registered runners printed on their bib
3. A fashion swap - go along with with a garment you hate and swap it for something someone else hates - recycling in action!

So it's a tad less taxing and probably a tad more fun than the traditional swimming, cycling and running affair.

Battersea Park will be alive with guest celebrities (Shazia Mirza has the starting gun and Guardian columnist, Sam Murphy, is doing the stretch and warm-up), guided tree walks, massages, wood sculptures, face painting and, of course, trees! We just don't think enough about the trees.

Warm up and stretch starts at 9.30am and the race goes off at 10.15. BBC Weather thinks it might be fine tomorrow so go along and support the runners, throw some cash at the trees (well, in collecting buckets) and support the greening renaissance - Trees for Cities is working towards another million London trees for 2012 and they're nearly halfway there.

Image of last year's leafy starting line courtesy of Trees for Cities.

As if Open House wasn?t enough to get you exploring the capital tomorrow, TfL announce London Walking Weekend.

They?ve arranged free walks in every borough and have a big tent at the Mayor?s Thames Festival to offer further advice.

As usual with such things, they?ve conducted a questionnaire to make the job of the headline writer a little easier. We?re told that 1 in 6 Londoners think Embankment and Charing Cross stations are a kilometre apart. And 1 in 10 of us believe Waterloo and Covent Garden are a 45 minute slog away from each other (actually, it?s a short stroll over Waterloo Bridge).

It?s all part of a £126 million three-year TfL scheme to get us walking more. We suggest they employ Bob Crow to mastermind the project.

Photo taken from JustABoy's Flickr photostream.

St James wine merchant Berry Brothers and Rudd could be considered as a family-run community corner shop. But when you consider that the family are eighth generation owners, their local community includes the Queen and Prince Charles, and even the ?corner? is formed from Henry VIII?s tennis court, you soon realise that this place is in no danger from supermarket encroachment. It's possibly the poshest corner shop in history.

Londonist, lucky us, recently wangled a tour of the establishment at 3 St James Street. What follows is a sneaky peak into the hidden treasures and secret passages of Berry Brothers and Rudd.

This shop is old. Very old. It?s the oldest wine merchant in Britain, no less. The frontage and uneven wooden floor date back over 300 years to a time when a mysterious ?Widow Bourne? kept a coffee shop here. (The identity of Mr Bourne is unknown, but we believe they recently made a movie trilogy about him.) The floor is formed from the hacked up timbers of a forgotten ship. And the atmosphere of a disappeared London is bottled up as masterfully as a vintage Tokay.

Click below to enter the basement...and learn about a secret passage.

We descended to the first basement level down a rickety flight of stairs and into a small room. More treasures. A truncheon belonging to Napoleon III (nephew of the famous one) hung beside implements of the wine trade, and a nearby shelf held bottles, thick with dust, from the 19th century. We learnt how bottling only became economical in the early 20th century. Any vessels dating from older times are now very expensive. A leitmotif, we soon found, of most items in this place.

We had a quick poke around the subterranean wine school. The grand chamber, not unlike a school chemistry classroom, is where you can sample as many different types of wine your taste buds could wish for. Whether to spit or swallow is up to you. (Londonist always swallows.) Cheese and biscuits are also provided to soak up all that booziness. Don't spit these out. There's nothing less attractive than expectorated dairy products.

We were ushered down further, past portraits of assorted Messrs Berry, and through Georgian brick arches. A second large chamber was introduced to us as the erstwhile accommodation of Napolean III. The French statesman was good friends with one of the Berrys (the two served together as special constables - hence the truncheon - in one of those strange London happenstances). Boney junior negotiated lodgings here during a period of political difficulties at home. After a long spell as a storage area, the space was recently refurbished for corporate events. It's not unlike the vaults beneath the RSA off the Strand, for those who have been fortunate enough to pay a visit. Further examples of antique glassware were on display here.

Down we went, still deeper, into the storage cellars. Countless bottles of every vintage, worth millions of pounds, collected dust along the walls. A series of twisting passages led us to a final flight of steps and a locked iron gate. Through this portal lays a storage area for valuable wines not belonging to the company. We were asked not to photograph these racks, which is unfortunate, as they conceal a putative tunnel.

The company believe a passage, now blocked by wine racks and plaster work, leads from this room to St James? Palace. The 18th century shop, like seemingly every building in London of that time, harboured ladies of ill repute. Royals, long masters of the extra-marital assignation, would have found such a tunnel very useful. The rough location of this supposed route is shown on the map.

Back upstairs, we were given a much-practiced tour of BBR?s curiosities. Most famously, a set of scales from 1765 upon which many notable customers have been weighed - Pitt the Younger, Byron and, yes, Napolean III. We asked if the great and good of today are ever embalanced. ?No,? came the emphatic reply, ?But we had Chris Tarrant on them recently?. Unfortunately we weren't told how much he weighed.

Over in the corner hung a certificate of loss from White Star Lines. The Titanic?s owners were sorry to report the tragic submergence of 69 cases of the company?s wine (still unrecovered). Then there?s that alleged tennis court wall, just beyond, which now stores further examples of vintage wine, but once deflected backhand smashes from the corpulent monarch Henry VIII.

The tour finished with a peak in our favourite bit, the parlour, where Cutty Sark blended scotch was invented. Today, the room is used for meetings, and the occasional Friday night fraternisation of staff. A perk of the job that we're very jealous of.

Berry Brothers and Rudd might be a company of peerless antiquity in the wine trade, but they also move with the times. From coffee, on to port and champagne, and then wine, as fashions changed. Very recently, they've made the transition into web 2.0. They've just started a blog and are delivering, ahem, podcasks.

And their ultimate concession to modernity? Berry Brothers' headquarters are now, oh so incongruously, in Basingstoke. They might want to keep that one quiet.

Get your own peek inside this venerable institution, by visiting their popular wine school. Glug, glug.

Now, where would you like us to poke around next? Let us know in the comments.

By Matt Brown and Sian Meades