Degenerates

After a full English breakfast at Brixton's The Lounge on Sunday, we headed off in the glorious sunshine to the Tate Modern, where the fascinating story of the treatment of modern art in Nazi Germany is being displayed.

"Our patience with all those who have not been able to fall in line is at an end. What you are seeing here are the crippled products of madness, impertinence, and lack of talent. I would need several freight trains to clear our galleries of this rubbish. This will happen soon."

Thus spake Adolf Zieglar, president of the Reich Culture Chamber, in 1937 at the beginning of the Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich, during which some 650 paintings, sculptures, prints and books from the collections of 32 German museums were displayed by the Nazis as examples of "degenerate art".

Artists included Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Emil Nolde (ironically a Nazi), Franz Marc and Pablo Picasso (a major opponent of Fascism). Artistic movements included Dadaism, Cubism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Impressionism and Surrealism. Eventually, the concept of degeneracy led to the confiscation of over 20,000 works of art by over 200 artists.

German artists were branded enemies of the state and many were forced into exile, for example Beckmann to Amsterdam, Ernst to the US, Klee to Switzerland. In 1938, Kirchner committed suicide in Switzerland. Those who remained in Germany had to endure a ban on producing work or working in universities. Many of Jewish descent, of course, eventually ended up in concentration camps.

"Degeneracy" had its roots in the views of such pseudoscientific theorists as Max Nordau, whose 1892 book, Entartung (Degeneration), proclaimed that artists suffered from decayed brains, and that modern art -- from paintings to poetry -- was the product of mental pathology. Impressionism's "painterliness", for example, was the product of a diseased visual cortex.

These writings became the rallying point for the Nazi's theories on the racial purity of art. For the Nazis, only racially "pure" artists could produce racially "pure" art such as Romantic realism. Modern art, with its primitivism and abstractness, was all the more abhorrent because of its racially "impure" creators, and such impure work apparently had a decadent, destablising influence on German society.

At the Entartete Kunst exhibition, examples of degenerate art were crammed onto the walls and surrounded by emblazoned slogans such as "Insolent mockery of the Divine under Centrist rule", "Revelation of the Jewish racial soul", "The ideal - cretin and whore" and "Even museum bigwigs called this the 'art of the German people'".

The show is considered to be the twentieth century's first blockbuster art exhibit, with an estimated attendance of 3 million visitors. It ironically exposed many people to their first viewing of prime examples of modern art.

This tiny exhibition at the Tate is well worth a visit. Afterwards, we relaxed in the member's lounge upstairs and tried to read the Sunday papers in the midst of bickering couples and playful children, before taking a boat back along the choppy Thames to Pimlico.

"Coincidence?" *

First picture, Lucio Fontana's "Waiting" at the Tate Modern today. Second picture, one of cigarette company Silk Cut's famous adverts. Unfortunately, the first reminded me of the second, rather than the other way around, and I didn't hesitate to let everyone around me know it: "Oh, it looks like the Silk Cut ad!"

* An in-joke -- at my expense. Please excuse me.

Down and out in suburbia

The bleak and brooding side of American suburbia was explored today in 14 panoramic, über-theatrical and colour-drenched photographs by Gregory Crewdson at the White Cube gallery:

Take one: A scratched and sodden woman with knees encrusted with mud sits alone on the bed with the remains of a rose bush in her hands. Behind her lies the long trail of thorns, petals, roots and dirt on the carpet.

Take two: A man and woman lay post-coitally naked on a dirty mattress in a squalid garden littered with debris, oblivious to both their immediate surroundings and the windows of the house overlooking them next door.

Take three: A mother and son sit inert at a table, not looking at one another. Their untouched dinner includes a half-cooked roast leaking blood. There are upturned bottles of pills on the dresser and an undrunk glass of liquour and ice on the kitchen counter.

Take four: A woman sits on the passenger side of a car that is idling at the traffic lights of a deserted crossroads, gazing absently at the empty driver's seat beside her.

Crewdson's work presents a very different portrait from the pared-down and spare vernacular America of Diane Arbus, Edward Hopper or Stephen Shore. Crewdson's photos are intensely theatrical, technicolour dramas encrusted with finely-delineated detail.

We can only speculate what went on in each of his photos, for it is as if the camera lens has caught the action mid-scene. You would not be mistaken for wondering if these are staged film sets: each has been produced on a soundstage and Crewdson collaborates with a roster of actors, lighting crews, art directors, set dressers, grips, gaffers, and hair and makeup artists.

If the scenes are short on context and plot, they are long on cinematic atmosphere: deserted main streets, damp forests, overgrown railroad tracks, misty skies, shabby carpets, dripping blood, vacant faces, dimly-lit motel rooms.

Most of the scenes suffer from such an overload of detail that at times my imagination disengaged. Was it really necessary, for example, to scatter lots of props to convince us that the bleeding, hunched, glum woman in front of us is truly unhappy: an over-flowing ashtray, a discarded pair of stockings, tranquillisers and slimming pills strewn across a table?

Moreover, the dark side of American suburbia is a tediously over-worked concept these days. From Twin Peaks through American Beauty to Desperate Housewives, murder-madness-sex-and-death-in-the-'burbs is familiar cultural territory for most of us.

Despite these misgivings, I found the overall effect to be unsettling, intriguing, and technically mesmerising.

Liliphilia

After a disastrous dinner of aubergine and sweet potato curry (when will I remember that aubergines will release much of the oil they absorb once they are cooked, so I needn't add so much at the start), we settled down to watch the enigmatic, opaque and utterly disturbing All About Lily Chou-Chou on DVD.

Lily Chou-Chou is a popular Japanese pop star who may or may not be real. Her legions of alienated teenage fans seem able to find solace and meaning in their lives only via an internet site devoted to her. One of these fans is Hayato, a high school student living in the provinces, who has a crush on music prodigy Ayumi. Online, Hayato expresses his devotion to Lily with passion and verve. Offline, like Ayumi, he is painfully shy, unassuming and lonely. He and others like him are easy prey for extreme forms of bullying -- which include public masturbation, rape and prostitution -- at the hands of a group of boys whose ringmaster is bored classmate, Shugo.

Shugo and Hayato were once friends, joining the kendo club together, discussing astronomy and engaging in a little petty crime. But Shugo began to change after a trip to Okinawa ended fatally. On his return to school, he defeated the reigning school bully and unleashed his own violent and arbitrary brand of humiliation that left few -- including his friend Hayato -- untouched.

An extremely painful and graphic story of wanton teenage cruelty, made all the more haunting and bleak by the beautifully kinetic digital cinematography.

Related link:

+ "I started out wanting to depict a youth who lives in a state of confusion between daily life and virtual reality, someone for whom the virtual reality is totally confused with real life. But as I developed the story and worked on the film, I realised that most people are living that way." Director Shunji Iwai.

Bebo and Diego

Last night, we witnessed the magic of Spanish Gitano (gypsy) cantaor Diego el Cigala and Afro-Cuban pianist Bebo Valdés at the Royal Festival Hall. This ended up being a real treat for me as my knowledge of flamenco -- indeed, most Latin -- music is very poor.

El Cigala was born in 1968 and began singing on the streets of Madrid before accompanying flamenco dancers on stage. The strength and passion of his voice soon distinguished him as a solo artist. Valdés was born in 1918 and has been playing the piano in Cuba and in Europe for more than 60 years. He is considered a pioneer of Afro-Cuban music. Last year, the two artists released the heartfelt Lágrimas Negras (Black Tears) -- an album that fused rumbas, guajira, sons and boleros, and won the two stars a Grammy.

Flamenco has always been a mélange of musical traditions, from the gypsies who brought their music perhaps from northern India, through Spanish, Jewish, Arabic and Berber influences, to blending with the blues, jazz, hip hop and rock. El Cigala's blend of flamenco and blues is produced by a voice that is hoarse and soulful: the voice of a man who drinks too many whiskys, smokes too many cigars and has had his heart broken one too many times. And yet this is a man who is in such command of his voice that what fills the hall is mellow, smooth and heart-stoppingly beautiful.

I'm not a fan of Latin jazz (much contemporary jazz at all, in fact), but Valdés plays with such virtuosity and flourish that I was captivated by the melodies spinning out of his fingers as they danced across the piano keys.

The band also included a mournful double-bass, skittish percussion and shuffling cajon. The musicians faced each other in a circle and played to each other in a call-and-response style that was so intimate, our presence as an audience felt like an intrusion.

Yes, I was utterly seduced.

Related links:

+ "I began to discover similarities between Cuban and Spanish music. For example, there's a malagueña cadence which is exactly the same as our guaguancó. As in many other cases, there are similar rhythms and harmonies thanks to African and Indian influences." Interview with Bebo Valdés.

+ "In flamenco there's more and more desire to learn all the time, people are dying to create." Interview with Diego el Cigala.

Masala night

Spent a chilled evening catching up with friends after work. We met in Soho's Alphabet Bar for mohitos and caipirinhas, then walked round the corner for an Indian (as opposed to a Bangladeshi) at the modern, open-plan and split-level Masala Zone.

Masala Zone serves tasty, earthy Indian street food such as dahi puris (bowl-shaped, feather-light wafers filled with spiced chickpea and potato) and chana dabalroti (chickpeas, lotus root and toasted bread); thalis (including ayurvedic), noodles and curries; nimbu pani (salt water lemonade), sweet and salty yoghurt lassis, beer and wine.

Indian street food is comfort eating of the highest order in my thoroughly biased opinion, and my fondest memories of India are of eating deep-fried puffy vegetable samosas or lamb cutlets with tamarind sauce and drinking freshly-squeezed sugarcane or sweetened lime juice from a steel beaker, whilst perched on rickety metal benches, in makeshift tin huts, as cars and lorries hurtle by.

Tonight, we had mixed starters, including minced lamb patties and chickpea samosas, and then substantial lamb thalis -- metal platters with timbales of rice, poppadoms, chapatis, dhal, gobi (cauliflower) bhaji, coriander and mango chutnies, and tender curried lamb stew.

We were too stuffed to even finish our plates, let alone have one of their delicious desserts -- such as creamy srikhand (strained yoghurt with saffron), sticky gulab jamun, and mango kulfi (dense Indian icecream).

Oh well, there's always next time.

Related links:

+ Up Bombay. "Long before it appears on the world's hippest menus, India's most authentic cuisine - the street food of Mumbai - can be sampled for a few rupees from the city's myriad and varied stalls. 'Western people do not understand street food. It is all about someone doing one brilliant dish for years, passing the spice mix and secret ingredients down through the family and everyone in the city knowing the best stalls.' " The Observer Food Monthly on Mumbai's street food.

+ It's curry, but not as we know it. "New wave Indian restaurateurs are eschewing the traditional image of chicken tikka, lager and flock wallpaper in favour of stylish interiors and posh cuisine. But one thing never changes - wherever you eat your curry, you can be sure they've got nothing like it in downtown Bombay." The Observer Food Monthly on the "new wave" of Indian cooking in Britain.

Other link today:

+ Navigating open source licensing. "The decision to use an open source license can plunge Web professionals into a mire of patent, trademark and copyright law. In this expose, Sitepoint speaks with Eric Raymond, cofounder of the Open Source Initiative, in an effort to untangle the complexities of open source licensing."

Crumbs

Today at the Whitechapel Gallery, we viewed the satirical comic strips of Robert Crumb -- sometimes described as the godfather of the underground comics movement. I rarely read comic books or graphic novels, bar the odd Sandman or Akira, but I enjoy Crumb's irreverent and sardonic take on his own and American life, and his dense, black and white graphics packed with action.

Robert Crumb in The Guardian:

+ G2 in Crumbland
+ "America has become this soulless suburban culture"
+ "I'd rather be dead than mediocre"

Twists and turns

We spent the afternoon in Soho, eating a scrumptious falafel sandwich in wholemeal pitta bread, with salad and chips at the Maoz cafe on Old Compton Street. Then we wandered over to the heavenly-aromatic Algerian Coffee Store across the road to buy some coffee and violet-flavoured candy. This store has a long presence in Soho -- opened in 1887 by one Mr Hassan. It now sells over 60 different types of coffee beans -- raw and roasted. The scent from my bag followed us all over Soho for the rest of the afternoon.

After mojitos at the Alphabet Bar, we crossed the river to the Purcel Room to watch the dazzling young dancer Akram Khan perform a series of epic Hindu mythologies to Kathak -- an ancient Indian classical dance form. Stories included that of the reluctant warrior Arjuna -- so powerful a marksman that he can hit the eye of a revolving fish -- who is persuaded into battle by Lord Krishna; and Arjuna's son Abhimanya, who learned the ways of war inside the womb.

Khan dances with such exhilerating fluency. Tonight, his mercurial body spun across the stage and his quicksilver arms shattered the air into a thousand shards. There were moments when his body practically levitated with an intense series of vibrations that went from his head to his toes. Yet Kathak is a very linear, precise, methodical dance form and at no point did Kahn lose control. His agility was taut and composed.

I've only ever seen Khan as part of a larger ensemble, when he performed Ma here last year. So I was unsure whether he alone would be able to command all my attention. I needn't have worried. Khan has enough physical magnetism to fill a stage several times over. The Independent once summed up Khan's appeal perfectly: "Khan has more charisma than a fistful of veteran star performers. When he transfixes you with his kohl-rimmed eyes, you feel he could charm a whole pitful of snakes."

And actually, he wasn't alone. His live band included sitar, tabla, mridanga and cello as well as the haunting and sublime Sufi vocals of Faheem Mazhar, who once performed suspended upside down on stage for Khan. Their musicianship was so spectacular that they frequently stole the show.

Related links:

+ "Everything in Indian music works mathematically and is very logical. Once that's understood, the music can be appreciated in a different way, and you can start playing around with the rules. There's a lot of improvisation, and the complex patterns we work from are more simple than they look." Akram Khan speaking to Culture Kiosque (Reg. req.)

+ The mathematical precision of Kathak

"When I hear the word culture I take out my checkbook"

On Wednesday, we went to hear Barbara Kruger and William Gibson discuss Contested Territories: Conversations in Practice at the Tate Britain.

When artist Barbara Kruger's red and white slogans in bold Futura typeface appeared in the store windows of Selfridges last year, it was impossible not to spot the irony of using anti-consumerist messaging to promote a summer sale.

Kruger's slogans appropriate public spaces that would otherwise be given over to advertising. Her slogans appear on book covers, posters, billboards, t-shirts, matchbooks, buses, bus shelters; in galleries, subway stations, newspapers, magazines:

• "I shop therefore I am"
• "Buy me, I'll change your life"
• "We are slaves to the commodities around us"
• "When I hear the word culture I take out my checkbook"
• "You want it, you buy it, you forget it"

When a woman in the audience accused the artist of selling out to Selfridges, Kruger replied, "There is no space outside the global market economy, so I try to work within it." Kruger did not comment on the irony of the audience member discovering Kruger's window dressings whilst shopping in the Selfridges sale!

Author William Gibson also spoke of mediating the constant flux of information we find ourselves a part of. He said his work is an attempt to model the constant flow of information of modern life; an attempt to achieve parity between it and his "authorial membrane". The aim of all his writing has been, he said, to pass the Turing Test: can you put a machine behind a curtain and have it pass for human?

An audience member asked him about his research techniques. He replied that he doesn't "do research" as such, that his mode of being in the world is as an "automated magpie": everything he sees, hears and experiences goes into the "giant skip" of his mind where it vanishes and takes on a life of its own. "Later, when I reach back in, it comes out as if the elves created it." Often, the thing comes back as banal and peculiar.

Both artists ruminated on the effects of living in an ever-connected -- a cyber -- world. Kruger wondered what it would be like to live life not viewed though a lens, and celebrated the fact that we can use the media rather than have it use us: "We can use a camera and not call ourselves photographers; we can write but not be writers." We use these things as tools, as pleasure, she asserted, to process and shape information rather than be defined by it.

Gibson claimed, "One day our grandchildren will look at us, as a species, as 'not fully human' because we are constantly connected. The nature of human experience is being altered by this stuff." And yet, he too was not casting a negative judgement on this condition, situating it within a wider, longer, historical context that includes the connective technologies of cave paintings, the printing press, telephones and TV. As such, he said, he feels a part of a long human project that predates religion.

An interesting night, for which my summary here does no justice.

Related links:

+ Webcast of the discussion. Not yet online, it seems.

+ "The Billboard Liberation Front states emphatically and for all time herein that to Advertise is to Exist. To Exist is to Advertise. Our ultimate goal is nothing short of a personal and singular Billboard for each citizen. Until that glorious day for global communications when every man, woman and child can scream at or sing to the world in 100Pt. type from their very own rooftop; until that day we will continue to do all in our power to encourage the masses to use any means possible to commandeer the existing media and to alter it to their own design."

Other links today:

+ Life lessons in virtual adultery. "If you walked into a room and found your partner in a passionate clinch with someone else you'd probably have good cause to worry. But would you worry if those doing the kissing were characters in a game being controlled by your partner and someone else?"

+ Playlist anxiety. "Sharing playlists on an office network turns out to be something like a peacock spreading his feathers for display. People actively work to create an image of themselves through the music they make available to others, just as they might by buying a new car or showing off a cell phone. Public embarrassment may now be the routine lot of the unhappy freshman who gets caught with a collection too heavily weighted toward the collected works of Weird Al Yankovic."

+ Foiling spies at the Vatican. "Computer hackers, electronic bugs and supersensitive microphones threaten to pierce the Vatican's thick walls next week when cardinals gather in the Sistine Chapel to name a papal successor. Spying has gotten a lot more sophisticated since John Paul II was elected in 1978."

+ What does Dubya listen to on his iPod? "George W Bush is a fan of country music and classic rock, but he also likes 'a little bit of hard core and honky tonk', his iPod playlist suggests."

+ The annotated New York Times. The NYT complete with blogging citations. Fantastic!

Island living

The latest Dubai man-made island project consists of some 300 islands grouped together into the continents of the world.

Other links today:

+ Nehanda Abiodun. Fascinating story of a black activist's exile from the US to Cuba and how she got her moniker of "godmother of hip hop cubano".

+ Cuban hip hop reaches crossroads. The politicisation of Cuban hip hop.

+ What do you call two straight men having dinner face-to-face without the aid of a television or the crutch of sports? A Man Date. (Reg. req. Via randomWalks)

+ "Star Wars fans have started queuing seven weeks early for the opening of the final movie - but appear to have camped outside the wrong cinema." Silly link of the day!

Saturday on my mind

On Saturday, we also visited The Photographers' Gallery to see work by the four artists shortlisted for this year's £30,000 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. These included Luc Delahaye's monumental panoramas from war-torn frontlines, Jörg Sasse's manipulations of "found" photographs, JH Engström's magically tense portraits and interiors (below) and Stephen Shore's colour-saturated slices of American life (above).

The latter two were my favourite, and although both photographers share a fondness for capturing abandoned meals on tables and unmade beds in motel rooms, their photographs are quite different.

Engstrom's are ethereal, nervy, twitchy, tense photos of subjects and objects caught trying to escape the lens. His people and interiors are lonely and forlorn.

I've written before about my fondness for Shore. His photos of Americana are rooted, grounded, solid, posed, composed -- objects and subjects presenting themselves to the lens. His is a crisper, brighter world.

Of course, we then ended up in the wonderful cafe, perusing the papers, drinking tea and eating chocolate cake.

Afterwards, we made the grave mistake of watching Sahara, featuring actors who are as monumentally monotonous as the plot. I'll leave it to The Guardian's wonderful Mr Bradshaw to sum up the acting in a way no one else can:

"Once again, Matthew McConaughey proves that he is modern cinema's Mr Zero Charisma. He is the celluloid equivalent of Rohypnol: a deadening whiff of pure boredom that deprives you of the power to think, speak or move your limbs. It wears off after a few hours, leaving you face-down in a stagnant pool of vanilla Diet Coke."

Küba

After a sunny full English breakfast, coffee and iced cranberry juice at Brixton's The Lounge, we headed to Küba -- the art installation of Turner prize nominee Kutlug Ataman, at the derelict Sorting Office on London's New Oxford Street. Ataman interviewed forty residents of Istanbul ghetto Küba and we viewed their stories on battered analogue televisions from an array of frayed and shabby armchairs that could have come straight from any of their own homes.

The residents were largely Kurdish and -- as the name may suggest -- Küba was originally set up in the 1960s by hard-left Kurdish nonconformists looking for a place to hide. Now the shanty town is a refuge for all kinds of people who have slipped through the social net, who are marginalised and disenfranchised. Hardly the kind of place you'd see featured in a guide book or the travel pages of a Sunday newspaper.

A girl tells of her beatings at the hands of her stepmother, a father hopes his son will use education as a means to escape poverty, an elderly woman bristles with pride at the closeness and unity of the Küba residents, a young boy giggles as he breakdances on the floor for the camera, a woman describes the torture she endured for putting up an anti-government wreath, another woman cries because her family cannot afford a car to drive her child to hospital each day, a movie buff talks at length about his favourite movie Notting Hill.

A complex, diverse, and intricately-knit community of outcasts emerges from the cacophonic narratives and makes this installation utterly compelling. It demands repeated visits.

A grittier, more politicised Kurdish counterpoint to the Royal Academy's lustrous Turks exhibition.

The Post Office Sorting Office itself is an extraordinarily dingy, cavernous, labyrinthine shell of a building, full of concrete and graffitti, industrial chutes and nailed planks -- a place from where, up until 1995, almost two million parcels and letters were delivered each week. The site was a refuge for squatters and pigeons before Artangel used it to house Küba.

The Sorting Office (photos)

Küba installation (photos)

Related link:

+ Kutlug Ataman introduces some of Küba's characters to The Guardian:

"Erol has a coop full of special pigeons. His hobby is quite a financial burden, so, to sustain it, he steals money from people at knifepoint, or puts his life in danger by robbing other pigeon coops. ... Nejmi is a complete dyke, but she doesn't realise it. Even her mother says: 'What kind of a girl are you? You have girlfriends!' Nejla says she is in love with the neighbour's daughter. 'I am the boyfriend,' is how she puts it. ... Guler was in love with someone else, but she had had to marry her husband because he had raped her - she married her own rapist because he was her aunt's son."

Hip hop con Cubanismo

First we grabbed a quick bite to eat at Pizza Express -- delicious Giardiniera pizza with leeks, petit pois, peperonata, mushrooms, olives and tomatoes; and spicy American pizza with lots of pepperoni -- then we walked to the Festival Hall for a scorching night of Cuban hip hop, courtesy of Orishas.

My knowledge of Cuban music is lamentably weak -- believing that it has fossilised during the economic blockade into endless varieties of easy-listening Buena Vista Social Clubs. But thankfully Orishas have not been strangulated by poverty or tradition: they draw on traditional Latin sounds such as son, rumba and guaguanco, to add piquancy to their distinctly urban hip hop beats. The result is a dynamite sound assessible to both the Buena Vista "oldies" and the hip hop "headz". They obviously live up to the meaning of their name: Orishas are Yoruban guardian spirits who traverse two worlds.

Tonight, Orishas' explosive music combined with an electrifying performance to produce an exhilerating evening and a desperate desire to hear and see more.

Related links:

+ Orishas: Gods in two worlds. "Still many people say, 'Yeah, Orishas is great but it's not real Cuban music'. We say it's normal, Orishas is Cuban music - but it's evolution. Cuban music isn't only Compay Segundo, no. It's the roots for my country, the roots for my music, but many many people like us are coming to fuse ragga with traditional music, ska with traditional music you know. And it's still Cuban."

+ The elements of revolution: The spirit of hip hop thrives in Cuba. "A lack of access to equipment combined with a disorganised market for the music has stumped many Cuban artists. Although strides have been made, there is only so much that can be done while living under a 40-year-old economic blockade. Graffiti artists live without spray cans. Breakers live without sneakers. MCs don't have notebooks and DJs have only one turntable and barely any vinyl. Yet no matter how sparse these tools might be, hip-hop is alive inside of them. Their expression won't be slowed down by want."

Latin mix

Last night we spent several gluttonous hours luxuriating in Sabor, a Colombian-owned Latin American restaurant with a menu fusing Colombian, Brazilian, Peruvian and Argentinian cuisines.

Sabor is a small and modern jewel on the dingy Essex Road in Islington. It's artfully-lit in ever-changing washes of bright colour, and has only the odd piece of brightly-painted wooden folk art on the walls. The food was fabulous: it was well-presented and all the flavours were well-balanced, despite practically every dish featuring tropical fruit.

We started with a platter of empanadas mixtas -- three traditional, deep-fried savoury pastries made from cornmeal dough and filled each with minced lamb, crab and plantain, and mushrooms, all served with fresh mint salsa.

One of our main dishes was pato con maracuya -- a deliciously juicy pan-roasted breast of duck with plantain/sweet potato/pecan nut mash and a sweet and tart passion fruit sauce. Another was a meaty coffee- and chilli-glazed red snapper with a sweet and sour tomato sauce and gallo pinto (black beans and brown rice) mash.

Somehow we found space for dessert: a moorish platter of mature manchego cheese, gorgonzola and guava jelly; and a heavenly-light papaya and whipped cream cheese terrine with mango sauce.

All this washed down with a pisco sour and a margarita de maracuya - Sabor's house cocktail of fresh passion fruit and lime juice blended with a white tequila, triple sec and passion fruit liqueur.

My only knowledge of Latin American food is of comfortingly stodgy stews and lots of meat, so the subtleties of the cuisine at Sabor was a very pleasant surprise.

We were so stuffed afterwards, we couldn't do anything else but go home. Which was lucky for me because I was just in time for Desperate Housewives!

Other links today:

+ How to get the perfect shave. For men.

+ Get slick. MeFi's comments on How to get the perfect shave

+ Utne online. Recent articles: a feminist Koran, the religious right, and a breast-feeding protest in Starbucks. Always thoughtful.

Growing up black and white

I returned to the Royal Festival Hall again tonight for the Africa Remix literature series, in which authors Delia Jarrett-Macauley and David Nwokedi discussed how they negotiate their ethnicity in England and in Africa.

Humour framed the entire evening. Nwokedi's novel describes a Nigerian-born, English-raised boy's life in England with a Nigerian father and white English mother. The mother valiantly struggles to remind her children of their Nigerian heritage through food: most of the week she feeds them typical English fare of bubble and squeak, fish fingers and frozen peas, fish and chips... Then one day she decides to try her hand at fried plantains and jollof rice, but replaces the traditionally-African chicken with the traditionally-English corned beef.

The Nigerian father repeatedly reminds his son to "be proud -- you are part African" and yet the boy ends up scrutinising his reflection in the mirror, wondering which part exactly of himself is African and how on earth he could be proud of it.

Nwokedi grew up in New Haven in southern England. In his school of 1500, there were only ever 3 other black students, and he and his two siblings thought they were "the black community". He first came to London in his late teens when his mother took her children to see The Black and White Minstrel Show. It was the first time he saw so many "black" people in one place.

Jarrett-Macauley is of Sierra Leone origin and she remembers visiting Africa for the first time at 7. She rushed off the plane in excitement and then promptly ran back in. "Mummy, mummy, everybody's black!" Her mother replied, "Yes dear, this is Africa." "So this is where they all are!" Jarrett-Macauley grew up in England on jollof rice and pigs' feet, but still thought "lunch was a sandwich".

A really entertaining night that made me think of my own experiences as the child of Indian parents, growing up in an all-white community in middle England, moving to multi-ethnic London, visiting India, and living on a Native American reservation as "a real Indian". But I'll save those reflections for another time.

Maria full of cocaine

Last night, we saw Maria Full Of Grace, a movie about Colombian cocaine mules -- those people (usually women) who transport cocaine from Colombia to the US using their stomachs as cargo bays.

The BBC and The Guardian have both criticised the film for its lack of macro-political context, but this is the very reason I enjoyed it so much. The story does not feature hyberbolic, machinegun-toting drug men chasing one another through mountains and cities. Instead, it eschews violence and melodrama in favour of the more human and subtle story, the kind of which we rarely see in films about drug trafficking.

Moreover, the mules have resorted to drug smuggling through economic pressures and yet they are not here portrayed as obvious victims: the lead character, Maria, for example, does not think like a victim; she is forthright, intelligent and clear-headed, turning to drug smuggling as a way to support herself during pregnancy after having refused the suggestion from her slacker boyfriend that he do the right thing and marry her.

The attention to detail is phenomenal and the camera never flinches as it shows Maria taking medicine that slows the digestive system before swallowing 500g of cocaine -- divided between 62 latex-wrapped pellets the size of large grapes -- in Colombia, and then washing them in toothpaste after she excretes a few in the airplane toilet and re-ingesting them. It also does not shy away from showing the fatal effects on another mule of a pellet bursting in her stomach and her stomach being cut open to retrieve the rest of the drugs.

A calm, clear-sighted and compelling drama that I would like to see again.

Related link:

+ 'Everyone deserves a decent burial'. "Orlando Tobon has a mission: to identify the bodies of drug mules - and return them to their families. As a film about his work opens, The Independent meets a Colombian hero."

Other links today:

+ Why can't you pay attention anymore? "It may be the greatest irony of the information age: All of that data flying at you by e-mail, instant message, cell phone, voice mail and BlackBerry--it could actually be making you dumber. No one really multitasks. You just spend less time on any one thing."

+ A big breakfast at Burger King. Chain debuts Enormous Omelet Sandwich with more calories, fat than a Whopper.

+ Is the surfeit of culture dulling our senses? "Our home, our city, our world, our life is now a supermarket for the satisfaction of the senses. We could binge on Peking Opera if we wished, or read nothing but Uruguayan poets, or fill up our Netflix queues with films from Japan and Japan alone. I can think of some serious downsides to this wealth..."

+ De.lirio.us is the cheeky new social bookmarking tool on the scene to compete with del.icio.us

+ MacDonalds to pay rappers up to $5 every time a song name-checking the Big Mac is played

+ Watch manufacturers nervous as people use their cellphones to tell the time

Weekend

My weekend began on Friday with a comfortingly wholesome dinner of black bean and smoked chorizo stew with rice served in a heavy earthenware bowl, washed down with a sweet and tart freshly-squeezed passionfruit juice at Canela, a fabulous and tiny Brazilian-Portuguese cafe tucked behind the Seven Dials of Covent Garden.

Then we strolled in the evening warmth across Hungerford Bridge to the Royal Festival Hall to experience the northern Senegalise singer Baaba Maal in concert with his band of -- it seemed -- one hundred. The spectacle was exhilerating: from Maal's spiraling and twisting wail, the dancers' flailing limbs and multiple colourful costume changes; to the spontaneous breakdancing, manic drumming and screeching saxophones. All performed to a projected backdrop of the art of the Africa Remix exhibition.

Saturday was another sunny day, so a return to Covent Garden was due and my first ever wander around the London Transport Museum, before a simple sushi lunch -- mackeral, salmon, prawn and octopus -- at the small and spartan Kulu Kulu. My craving for some American candy brought us to the very cute Cybercandy store, crammed wall-to-wall with candy from the US and Japan, where we bought jelly beans (garlic was the featured flavour but we weren't brave enough to try, let alone buy), vanilla cream soda, Reese's Pieces (peanut butter chocolate smarties) and Red Hots (cinnamon flavoured hard candy). We window-shopped our way down Floral Street to the Photographer's Gallery, where we scoffed chocolate and carrot cakes with tea at the cafe's wooden benches and tables, and caught up with the Saturday papers.

Still invigorated from our Baaba Maal experience, we returned to the Africa Remix exhibition today at the Hayward as it's the last week, before ending the day by watching the very excellent Maria Full of Grace -- a movie about Colombian drug mules. But more of that tomorrow.

Related links:

+ "A musician in Africa should be someone who educates. You can educate people and tell them their history and share information with people with your songs. When anything happens, people want to know your reaction, your advice, and what they should do. And not just to do with culture. It can be anything, from politics to religion." Baaba Maal speaks to The Guardian.

The island of San Serriffe

One of my favourite April Fools pranks is this one from The Guardian in 1977:

"In 1977, The Guardian published a special seven-page supplement in honor of the tenth anniversary of San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands. A series of articles affectionately described the geography and culture of this obscure nation. Its two main islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. Its capital was Bodoni, and its leader was General Pica. Articles described the eccentric culture of the island. One strange island custom was the Festival of the Well Made Play. Authentic advertisements also accompanied the articles. For instance, Texaco offered a contest for which the first prize was a two-week trip to Cocobanana Beach in San Serriffe.

"The Guardian's phones rang all day as readers sought more information about the idyllic holiday spot.

"Few noticed that everything about the island was named after printer's terminology."

As a "leftie" myself, I can't resist The Left-Handed Whopper either:

"In 1998, Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a Left-Handed Whopper specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new Whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, many others requested their own 'right-handed' version."

98 more great pranks

Other links today:

+ Nine Inch Nails are back! New album out in May. On tour now. Great Reznor interview in current Kerrang magazine. Time to start visiting my favourite NIN site again.

+ Eboy's London. Tokyotastic! (Large image file)

+ Why cyclists wear black shorts. ROTFL!

+ English accents and dialects. A collection of audio samples at the British Library.

+ Brian Eno in Index magazine, 2002. "Musician, producer, and artist Brian Eno would much rather talk about urbanism, new computer applications, or emergence theory than something as pedestrian as EQ levels or his own brilliant musical history."

+ Eskimos actually have few words for snow, says linguist Steven Pinker. "Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or two hundred, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at two. Counting generously, experts can come up with about a dozen, but by such standards English would not be far behind with snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanche, hail, hardpack, powder, flurry and dusting."

+ The way we live now: Bad connections. More on ego-casting. (Reg. req.)

+ Are socialites still networking? "More than a year after social networking became the leading buzzword in internet startup circles, companies in the sector haven't gained the traction early enthusiasts predicted. Still, many of the bigger networking services say the number of users is growing steadily, and if they're not profitable already, they soon will be."

+ Contact lenses react to blood-sugar levels. "Contact lenses that change their appearance according to the wearer's blood-sugar level could one day help people with diabetes keep track of their levels non-invasively, new research suggests."

+ Western states offer the most coffee shops."Coffee drinkers in the Western United States have the most stores from which to snag a cup of Joe, according to a new survey. Anchorage scores highest with the most coffee outlets per capita."

"Still 6 songs left to go?"

Last night, I finally saw the "infamously-explicit-for-a-mainstream-movie" 9 Songs, with a friend whose accompaniment to the film provided all the narrative I needed:

• [After one of the many performances filmed at the Brixton Academy] Me: "So that's the third song." Her:"Oh, so that's why it's called 9 Songs. God, does that mean we've still got 6 songs to go?"
• [After dinner, during yet another romp on the bed] Her: "I'd rather watch them eat."
• [During a bathroom scene] Me: "The paint effect on the wall's really nice." Her: "Not very practical though, is it? No splashback tiles."

Her constant stream of comments saved me from leaving my seat before the tedious 69 (oh yes) minutes were up.

Okay, it wasn't that boring: the movie never billed itself as anything other than an unpretentious, ordinary, explicit, lo-fi accounting of two strangers having casual sex and nothing more; and this spare, pared down approach made it refreshingly engaging, for some of the time.

Beyond that, however, I can't think of anything else to say: the movie was bland and the experience left me indifferent. Perhaps if more attention had been focussed on the guy's sexual experience -- his body, his desires, his needs -- I, as a woman, would have been more engrossed.

It's been a while since I left the cinema completely nonplussed.

I'll leave the reviews to the pros:

+ Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian: "This is no great love affair; there are no big scenes of tears and laughter; breaking up and making up. Leo and Kate on the prow of the Titanic it ain't. Its very casualness, its unfinishedness and downbeat messiness give the affair the feeling of real life, which by a further paradox makes it more engaging than something more obviously dramatic. ... Boring? Gosh, really? Is that why all those male journalists in the audience were gulping and surreptitiously recrossing their legs? Because they thought it was boring?"

+ The BBC: "Kieran O'Brien and Margot Stilley star as a couple who do nothing besides go to rock concerts and have sex under fluorescent lighting, but while they bare a lot of skin, they fail to get beneath it. All that's left is the cinematic equivalent of a painful rectal examination and not just in the metaphorical sense. ... Actually this film does provoke thoughts about the meaning of life - mainly because you feel it slowly slipping away in wasting 70 precious minutes trying to figure out what the heck Winterbottom was thinking with this stultifying, self-conscious, and flesh-creepingly repulsive lot of codswallop."

Where worlds collide

It must be obvious to even the most casual listener that Radiohead have diverse musical influences, but hearing the wide breadth of music curated by Jonny Greenwood at the Ether festival last night at the Royal Festival Hall reminded me sharply of Greenwood's eclectic classical leanings and the various ways these have found themselves on to recent Radiohead albums -- particularly Amnesiac and the spellblindingly awesome Kid A. Greenwood has said:

"I get these enthusiasms which can drive the band crazy, but I just say: listen, French horns are amazing, we've got to find a way of using them. Or I'll say, it would be great if this song sounded like [Krzysztof] Penderecki [acclaimed Polish modern classical composer], or Alice Coltrane [famed jazz instrumentalist]. And it's childish because none of us can play jazz like Alice Coltrane, and none of us can write the kind of music that Penderecki does. We've only got guitars and a basic knowledge of music, but we reach for these things and miss. That's what's cool about it."

On its release, Pitchfork described Kid A as "an album of sparking paradox. It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 48 minutes".

The mix of music showcased at Ether last night was just as exquisite: from Greenwood's own subtly radiant smear -- by turns mystical and futuristic -- and dark and uplifting Piano for Children; through Olivier Messiaen's atmospheric, haunting and multihued tone poem La Fete des Belles Eaux, featuring 6 of one of the world's earliest electronic instruments -- the eerie, swooping and sliding Ondes Martenot; to the passionate and dynamic classical Arabic pieces of The Nazareth Orchestra.

The night was capped by a duet between diminutive Thom Yorke and Arabic singer Lubna Salame of Radiohead's Arpeggi and Where Bluebirds Fly. Yorke's voice is an amazingly unique instrument and his twisting falsetto crying over the sensual wail of Salame was simply mesmerising.

A gloriously hypnotic evening.

Related links:

+ Pop pioneer in love with the classics. "Classical music was Jonny Greenwood's original passion. He learned the viola at home in Oxford years before he picked up the guitar at 16. His first band was the Thames Vale Youth Orchestra, and he still remembers how 'the first time I heard a proper orchestra, the sound just blew me away.'"

+ Bodysong. Jonny Greenwood's magnetic score to the British film.

+ Radiohead at ease. Up-to-the-minute Radiohead news.

Just links

The best:

Some wonderful blogs I've been reading regularly:

+ Cassandra Pages. This woman writes beautifully about her life in Montreal. Her description of snow: "It's as if our whole world were inside an owl's wing: muffled, soft, white, and slightly blurred."
+ Budapest and the Rest. "The maternal instinct is, in my humble opinion, the instinct to get it on." Great line from an American in Budapest!
+ Meanwhile, Here in France. Another gorgeously-written blog.
+ Knäckebröd. A New Jerseyan in Sweden.
+ Stay of Execution. Sharp observations on life from rural America.
+ This Fish Needs a Bicycle. Have I not linked to this sparkling NYC blog already? The kind of blog-writing to aspire to; alas I could never be this personal.
+ Orangette. I will link to this Seattle food blog again and again, it's so yummy.
+ De Grouchy Owl. Another re-link to this descriptive account of life in urban Pakistan.

The rest:

+ Life isn't just as you want it? Remix it! "We're remixing our music consumption by buying songs online one at a time instead of in CD collections. We're remixing our TV behavior as TiVo-style video recorders let us 'make every night Thursday night'. We're remixing our media by grabbing online articles from dozens of different sources and then broadcasting our own opinions with blogs. When you get down to it, the remixing metaphor applies to almost any area you can think of."

+ Ego-casting, revisited. "Today's personal technologies, particularly the cellphone and the digital video recorder, are marvels of individual choice, convenience and innovation; they represent the democratization of the power of the machine. Our technologies are more intuitive, more facile and more responsive than ever before. In a rebuke to Marx, we have not become the alienated slaves of the machine; we have made the machines more like us and in the process toppled decades of criticism about the dangerous and potentially enervating effects of our technologies. Or have we?" Reg. req.

+ Geekfathers: CyberCrime mobs revealed. "Crime is now organized on the Internet. Operating in the anonymity of cyberspace, Web mobs with names like Shadowcrew and stealthdivision are building networks that help crackers and phishers, money launderers and fences skim off some of the billions that travel through the Web every day."

+ The inner world of Joe Blogs. "'The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything,' wrote Oscar Wilde 'except what is worth knowing.' Few things bear this out more convincingly than the world of blogging," argues The Times in their scathing attack on blogs.

+ Need a building? Just add water. "A pair of engineers in London have come up with a 'building in a bag' -- a sack of cement-impregnated fabric. To erect the structure, all you have to do is add water to the bag and inflate it with air. Twelve hours later the shelter is dried out and ready for use."

Let's talk about sex

Having grown up in the 70s and 80s, it is difficult for me to fully comprehend the high levels of secrecy and fear surrounding sexual practice. So last night's viewing of the filmed biography of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey was a real eye-opener.

The scientist Kinsey described sex education in the 1930s as "morality disguised as fact" and embarked on a comprehensive statistical analysis of American sexual behaviour. The appearance of the report Sexual Behavior In The Human Male in 1948 transformed the way people regarded their sexual activities by revealing how widespread premarital sex, adultery, homosexuality, oral sex, masturbation and even zoophilia were in American society. Its findings were so explosive that Kinsey quickly became a target of Hoover's anti-Communist witch-hunt.

The publication of Sexual Behavior In The Human Female a few years later, was even more explosive, focussing on such taboo subjects as female masturbation and the female orgasm. His research found that women were as sexual as men, and that a libidinous sex life was essential to a woman's marital bliss. He even found that women who had engaged in premarital sex were more likely to have orgasms in marriages than those who had not.

Although the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the States was a direct result of Kinsey's research, there are still archaic state laws today that outlaw oral sex, even within marriage: in Maryland, for example, they will lock you up for 10 years. In North Carolina: "If any man and woman not being married to each other, shall lewdly and lasciviously associate, bed, and cohabit together, they shall be guilty of a Class 2 misdemeanor." In Idaho, the penalty for adultery is up to a $1000 fine and three years in the state pen. Even "blue-state" Massachusetts will bang you up for three years if you commit adultery and five years if you sell a dildo.

Related links:
+ Famous Kinsey Report statistics
+ More Kinsey Report findings
+ Biography of Alfred Kinsey by PBS
+ Kinsey Institute
+ Legislating your sex life. A search of sex laws turns up some surprises.

"The daffodils are out, what about you?"

Spring on the London Underground

Hanging out

Had such a chilled weekend, yet somehow still managed to be as busy as ever. I think it was the glorious weather that warmed my mood and slackened my pace.

Saturday began with a lie in -- preparing for the day ahead by luxuriating under the covers, watching the sun stream in through the wooden blinds and listening to the birds shrieking at each other through the open window -- followed by a flick through the papers over brunch, and a saunter -- arms bare to the sun -- to catch the bus to Aldwych.

We meandered through the backstreets from Drury Lane and Covent Garden to the top of Tottenham Court Road, then walked down its length towards Oxford Street, wandering in and out of whatever gadget shop took our fancy -- dreaming up our electrical wishlists.

Arms still amazingly free of shopping, we strolled across a sun-hazy Hyde Park to Bayswater, where we sank into two antique armchairs of a backstreet pub -- doors and windows flung open to the quiet street -- for some liquid refreshment. By evening, we found ourselves at the cinema watching, in astonishment, Christian Bale's phenomenonly gaunt features and emaciated body in the predictable but moody The Machinist. Cheap and delicious kebabs in a fluorescent-lit and plastic-tabletopped cafe, followed by Never Mind The Buzzcocks on the TV at home capped a wonderful day.

Sunday began with a delightfully purposeless stroll around Tate Britain -- enjoying The Cholmondeley Ladies, The Saltonstall Family and Giovanni Canaletto -- then vanilla ice cream cones from the van outside, and a jump on Damien Hirst's spotted Tate-to-Tate boat that took us along the Thames to the Tate Modern for a look at August Strindberg's broody paintings of blustery seas and skies. I found Strindberg's paintings dramatic enough, but ultimately -- curiously -- flat and uninspired.

After another look round the Tate's brilliant Beuys exhibition, we ate dinner by a window overlooking the River: tasty Caprina (goats cheese and sundried tomatoes) and Four Seasons (mushrooms, peperoni sausage, mozzarella, capers, olives and anchovies) pizzas followed by rich chocolate fudge cake and pear tart at the Pizza Express next to The Globe. Neat double whiskys on Whitehall ended a fabulously relaxed "summer" weekend.

English summer

I snapped this photo last year under Richmond Bridge on the River Thames, and the beautifully warm and sunny weather today has me hankering after long, sun-drenched walks along the Thames, picnics and papers in the park, ice cold beer in the pub garden, vanilla ice cream cone dripping down my arm, and bare legs under floaty skirts.

Though I wouldn't go as far as one of my work colleagues yesterday, who chirped, "Summer has come!", to which I replied, "Well, an English summer at least." And we've still got two days left of winter.

Sleeveless ti-shirts and bare skin out on the streets. Even the two love birds are necking and preening on the tree outside my window. Me, I'm putting on my coat.

C'mon, guys, it's not that warm.

Infernal London

Last night, we saw John Virtue's monochromatic paintings of London at the National Gallery. I had never heard of Virtue before, but I soon discovered that he is a remarkable artist who paints entirely in black and white on giant canvases, one of which stretches across seven metres.

His epic paintings of London are bleak and brooding battles between light and shadow: the darkened buildings of St Paul's, the Gherkin and others slowly emerge from blackened skies and the tumultuous Thames in a manner that recalls the tradition of such European landscape painters as Turner, Constable, Rubens and others.

Tutored by Frank Auerbach at the Slade, Virtue produced abstract explorations of the isolated wilds of Exmoor and the Pennine uplands, prior to moving to London to take up his post as the sixth National Gallery Associate Artist. But he treats London in a similar way: his London cityscapes are void of people and the elemental worlds of water and sky dominate. In fact, it is only when you move closer to the canvas that the outline of the city's buildings reveal themselves in subtle revelations.

"I have no interest in recording a rhetorical history of London," Virtue has said. "Really I'm interested in making exciting abstractions from what I perceive. So in a sense I'm not a Londoner painting London out of any roots or any kind of affection -- I'm an accidental tourist."

Afterwards we went to the excellent Indian version of Wagamama, Masala Zone off Carnaby Street for nimbu pani (spiced, freshly-squeezed lemonade) and Cobra beer (brewed in Poland), plus a delicious lamb thali and a Malabar seafood bowl with rice noodles. Always a great place to eat Indian food.

Related links:

+ "This is London in all its rain-sodden, beery-eyed, nervy exhilaration", Simon Schama on John Virtue in The Guardian

+ It's curry, but not as we know it. "New wave Indian restaurateurs are eschewing the traditional image of chicken tikka, lager and flock wallpaper in favour of stylish interiors and posh cuisine. But one thing never changes - wherever you eat your curry, you can be sure they've got nothing like it in downtown Bombay." The Observer Food Monthly on the "new wave" of Indian cooking in Britain.

How to dry a sweater

Handy laundry tip, courtesy of Sam Shepard:*

"He washed his red shirt in the sink. Laid a motel towel on the floor. Laid the shirt on the towel. As he smoothed the sleeves and crossed them on the belly of the shirt he thought of his own death. Of how they might cross his arms just like the sleeves on his own dead belly. He laid a second towel on top of the red shirt so the shirt was sandwiched then walked on top of the towel with his bare feet, making tight mincing steps, squeezing the water out. This was something he'd picked up from his mother. He'd seen her do this with her own bare feet on top of blue fuzzy sweaters with small synthetic shells for buttons. He'd seen her toes curl. Watched water squish out faintly bluer than water. Bleeding from dye. He thought of her feet and pictured them so vividly that his whole mother appeared before him."

From Motel Chronicles

* Not as random a blog entry as it would seem: I am doing laundry right now. I am reading Shepard. I am also a little bored.

Life Is A Miracle

Black marketeers hoovering up cocaine from railway tracks, brass beds flying through the air, naked lovers rolling down hillsides, dogs pouncing on dying pigeons, suicidal love-sick donkeys, deranged opera singers, and bathing bears all featured in the chaotic, frenetic and vibrant slapstick-cum-romantic movie we saw last night, Life Is A Miracle.

Set during the Bosnian war, the movie ostensibly tells the Romeo and Juliet tale of a Bosnian Serb railway engineer falling in love with his Muslim hostage. It has been slaughtered by the English critics for its superfluous storyline and for making a farcical lightness of war, but I really liked the fact that it shows how the mayhem of peoples' lives continues in spite of the mayhem of war: at its heart is not a story about the factions of war per se, but a story about the factions that persist within a community.

I found Life Is A Miracle so delightful, warm, funny and beautifully shot, that I broke out into spontaneous applause at the end (thankfully for those around me, it was a quiet applause).

Related link:

"What is the problem with you English? You killed millions of Indians and Africans, and yet you go nuts about the circumstances of the death of a single Serbian pigeon. I am touched you hold the lives of Serbian birds so dear, but you are crazy." Director Emir Kusturica chats to The Guardian in the village he built for himself on a mountain.

Other links today:
+ Turkey meatballs with sultanas and pine nuts. Yum.
+ Mumbai to Midtown, chaat hits the spot. "Chaats are jumbles of flavor and texture: sweet, sour, salty, spicy, crunchy, soft, nutty, fried and flaky tidbits, doused with cool yogurt, fresh cilantro and tangy tamarind and sprinkled with chaat masala, a spice mixture that is itself wildly eventful. The contrasts are, as one fan said, 'a steeplechase for your mouth,' with different sensations galloping by faster than you can track them." More yum. (Reg. req.)
+ Saucy is the new foodie webzine from the people behind Bookslut. "This is not a website for picky eaters. If you're cutting carbs, eating at McDonald's, or buying margarine, this may not be the site for you. But if you love all kinds of food like we do, Saucy is here to entertain and enlighten." Yey!
+ Wiki becomes a way of life. Hardcore Wikipedians.

Cocktastic

I was really excited to visit the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition at the Alison Jacques Gallery today because I have liked his work since I was a teenager, having discovered him through my love of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard. His photographs are perfectly controlled balances between "light and shadow, balance and symmetry, beauty and obscenity" and there is a wonderfully structured element to his work. The vintage silver gelatin paper the photos are printed on only serves to enhance the clarity of his images. I've only ever seen his work in books, so this exhibition was a real treat.

Portraits featured include rock icons Iggy Pop and Patti Smith (who Mapplethorpe lived with in the early 70s at the Chelsea Hotel); artists such as Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein and Ed Ruscha; writers William Burroughs and Bruce Chatwin; as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Richard Gere and gay porn star Peter Berlin.

Also hung were his architectural still lives, flowers and nudes. The exhibition was not as cocktastic as I had hoped and disappointingly there is a complete absence of any of his harder-core S-M images. But perhaps this is due to the curation by "nice and cosy" David Hockney: "I must admit," Hockney told the New Statesman, "I am not really attracted to some of Robert's more graphic sexual images -- I don't object to them, they're just not my thing." Shame really.

Afterwards, we succumbed to Waterstone's 3 for 2 offer on paperbacks. I bought David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Paul Auster's Oracle Night, Stephen Smith's Underground London, plus Fernando Pessoa's The Book Of Disquiet.

That's my reading for the year sorted then.

Knitting guerrillas

Knitting seems to be enjoying a fashionable renaissance at the moment -- not only in Hollywood but also in my humble office. The last time I clicked and clacked was several years ago whilst supervising school children during their prep sessions in India. I could barely master the basics of knitting: just "knit one, purl two" (or is it the other way around?). I never went beyond a one metre long scarf which I then unravelled and reknitted over and over again. For I was interested more in knitting as process, knitting as meditation. Losing myself in the click clack of the needles and the lengthening of the rows, I wasn't concerned whether my knitting was productive and certainly didn't care for knitting's potentially subversive functions.

The Craft Council's Knit 2 Together exhibition is concerned with just this: knitting as subversion and political practice. Pieces knitted from human hair, wire or paper from secondhand books hang alongside photographs of people wearing knitted balaclavas around NYC, knitted hand grenades and knitted furniture. Knit-ins on the Underground's Circle Line are also described and male knitters make statements about knitting being underrated because it's "women's work" and teaching themselves knitting and crochetting because "boys don't".

The relentless politicisation of the pieces (often simply for the sake of it) felt a little over-indulgent and tiring. However, I did enjoy one artist's work immensely: Kelly Jenkins and her humourous and edgy wall hangings based on cliched adverts from the sex industry. Her Knit Uncensored, for example, features a giant magazine cover advertising stories such:

• Turn your partner on with 22 new and uncensored knitting positions!
• Remember boys...It's all in the fingers!
• Real life stories! My knitted condom nightmare
• Nudist knitting colony uncovered in Wales

Her work gave me a much needed belly laugh.

Afterwards, we relaxed with drinks (Becks and heavy red wine) and food (aubergine and coconut curry, broccoli frittata, Greek salad, chicken with spinach) at the wonderfully bohemian Candid Cafe (part of the Candid Arts Trust centre behind Angel tube). The rickety Candid Cafe looks and feels like an delapidated 19th century French boudoir: antique couches for lounging in, huge wooden table for eating at, oil-painted nudes on peeling indigo and burgundy walls. The fact that it's entirely candlelit makes it an incredibly romantic place to chill in.

Scratch paper

I organise my work life with random bits of scrap paper strewn across my desk and Post-it notes plastered across my monitor. Despite working in new media and being interested in gagdets, I still prefer the tactility of paper over software when brainstorming a project or writing my to-do lists. I find my random bits of paper reassuringly lo-tech and non-linear (Post-its are highly associative, encouraging organic grouping and regrouping of ideas). The Post-it note has a spare utility that is refreshingly simple and efficient.

So I was curious to see how my favourite office utility would be transformed by artists exhibiting in Adam Carr's Post Notes exhibition at the ICA tonight. Carr asked artists from around the world to produce work on a simple Post-it note. They were allowed free reign over what they produced, so long as the basic qualities of the note were retained. Works ranged from the sublime to the plain silly: laser cut flowers, flick book animations, and notes with burnt out holes in them.

It's interesting that the Post-it note was created at the same time as the Apple computer. I've forgotten what a recent invention it is, and it's clearly become more ubiquitous than an Apple product. Apparently, the idea for the sticky note came to its creator, Art Fry, while singing in the church choir and becoming increasingly frustrated by attempts to bookmark his hymnal with loose bits of paper.

His colleague at 3M, Spencer Silver, had already developed an adhesive whose molecular structure consisted of minuscule spheres instead of an even coating. The spaces between the spheres meant that complete contact between tape and surface was impossible.

Despite the plethora of Post-it variations now available -- over 30 different colours, shapes and sizes, including software versions -- my favourite still remains the original canary yellow.

It was nice being in the ICA tonight. I haven't visited for a while and though they always have digital installations, I rarely see them. So I also made time to see their new media exhibition, Islandhopping, which their notes described as aiming "to question existing hegemonic structures of cultural, social, historical and political landscapes through the construction of platforms for discourse and spaces of tension via the recontextualisation of the geopolitical premise of the 'island'" -- a pretentiously long-winded way of describing what ultimately amounted to a great set of 60 pieces of videoart best seen after several drinks.

Then it was on to Soho's wonderfully homespun Waikiki bar -- surrounded by faded posters of Thai boxers -- to drink Moscow Mules, whiskey sours and Waikiki (passionfruit) vodkas. Now I'm absolutely zonked and ready for my bed. Good night!

Bossa nova starman

Tonight I watched Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and adored its quirky, oddball, deadpan humour, "terminal whimsy", technicolour overload, jaded lead protagonist, even its self-conscious and obtuse plot.

But what delighted me the most was the bossa nova reworkings of David Bowie songs. 11 songs, including Queen Bitch, Ziggy Stardust, Lady Stardust, Rock 'n' Roll Suicide, Five Years, Changes, Space Oddity and even When I Live My Dream, are reworked into lo-fi Portuguese acoustic versions sung by Brazilian samba star Seu Jorge.

Anderson is a huge Bowie fan, but Jorge thought that reworking 11 Bowie songs would be overkill. "I thought it might be like drowning your food in ketchup, with me being the ketchup -- too much," Jorge said. The Brazilian didn't even know any of the Bowie songs that he was asked to sing. "It's a different culture in Brazil. We only know Let's Dance. "

With the addition of Devo's Gut Feeling, Iggy's Search and Destroy, and Scott Walker's 30th Century Man in their original versions, I definitely need to get a hold of the soundtrack.

Other links today:

+ Cows hold grudges. Once they were a byword for mindless docility. But cows have a complex mental life in which they bear grudges, nurture friendships and become excited by intellectual challenges, researchers have found.

+ Canine suicides. A spate of what appear to be canine suicides has animal psychologists in Scotland baffled.

More strange stories

A load of old rubbish

Yesterday I cooked a lunch of scrambled eggs made with smoked salmon, chopped chives and grated lemon zest on toast, as inspired by the NYT article on what chefs eat when not on duty. Then we went to the Tomoko Takahashi exhibition at the Serpentine.

Most people collect objects at some point during their lives, from stamps and CDs to jewellery and vintage cars. We've all rummaged through car boot sales, antique shops, record fairs and eBay at one time or another, the heart racing as we locate our treasured booty. I used to collect Indian stamps, bootleg Bowie cassettes and Enid Blyton books, but as we moved from house to house (nine moves during my childhood), I lost them and most of my toys. For most of us, collecting is a private affair, but there are others who are driven to share their collections.

Britain's oldest museum, The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, began life in 1683 as the displayed collection of an antiquarian, astrologer and alchemist. Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum also began with the eclectic collection of a single collector, and still today resembles a dark and cluttered "cabinet of curiosities". More recently, Robert Opie's collection of packaging and advertising materials -- items we all throw away -- formed the basis of Opie's Museum of Memories in 1963.

The Japanese-born and London-trained artist Tomoko Takahashi's fascination with objects as historically and personally significant has led to several installations, the most recent of which include toys, games, puzzles, old furniture, desk lamps, typewriters and computers found in car boot sales, skips and museum basements.

On the surface, these objects appear to have been flung into every corner and across every surface -- even the walls -- of the gallery, but Takahashi is as interested in order and classification as in randomness and chaos. Looking at her work at the Serpentine, it is obvious that she places great importance on a specific set of complex principles, perhaps known only to her, to create distinct environments.

So different toys are grouped together in islands of colour and function: from the rusted gardening utensils, astro turf and farmyard animals that inhabit one room; through to the playing cards that linearly unite -- in ascending order -- picture frames on the wall of another; and to the broken scalextric tracks, model cars, wires and computer peripherals of a darkened third.

According to notes -- to herself and to her assistants -- scribbled on floors and walls, the artist's process is just as important as the final art piece. Photos reveal that she ate and slept in the Serpentine while constructing her installation, and photocopied posters show which car boots sales she visited to source her treasures. I read somewhere that her sense of ritual is inspired by the Japanese tea ceremony -- skills taught to her by her grandmother.

The Guardian hated the exhibition, describing it as "a very pretentious shop window installation". This is the first Takahashi work I've experienced (thanks for the tip, Hypatia), and I really enjoyed myself. I understand that her work can be seen as a critique of consumerism and obsolescence, but I also saw it as a paean to hoarding.

I wish I had kept all my old toys in the attic now.

When I got home, I ate a family-size pack of Galaxy Minstrels chocolates for dinner, to -- ahem -- honour my inner child of course.

Other link today:

+ Fear and golfing. Just prior to his death Hunter S Thompson invented a new sport, Shotgun Golf, with Bill Murray. His description:

"The game consists of one golfer, one shooter and a field judge. The purpose of the game is to shoot your opponent's high-flying golf ball out of the air with a finely-tuned 12-gauge shotgun, thus preventing him (your opponent) from lofting a 9-iron approach shot onto a distant 'green'. Points are scored by blasting your opponent's shiny new Titleist out of the air and causing his shot to fail miserably. After that, you trade places and equipment, and move on to round two."

Via the ever brilliant Popbitch.

Food, food, food

"Life itself is the proper binge" Julia Child.

It seems all I'm doing these days is eating lots. Of course, I blame it on the weather rather than greed! Today I cooked lunch for friends in St Albans:

• Chicken thighs and legs roasted with paprika, garlic and mixed herbs
• French green beans roasted with cherry tomatoes and fresh basil
• New potatoes fried with bacon and mixed with fresh watercress

All served with hot ciabatta and butter. Even if I say so myself, it was all rather delicious. Perfect comfort food for a cold day. We worked it all off with a brisk walk and play in the park with the children.

The five of us met at Oxford and have known one another for around 10 or 11 years. We don't see each other as often as we'd like but whenever we do it's as if no time as elapsed. There's none of the initial awkwardness or small talk that sometimes arises between friends who have not seen one another in a while. We slip right back into intimate conversation and I always feel my most comfortable with them. I'm incredibly lucky.

On return to London, we had whisky sours, Mochito and mixed fruit cocktails at Soho's Alphabet Bar, then back home to scoff fish and chips and watch Northern Exposure season 1 on DVD.

Foodie bliss.

Food links today:
+ Busman's holiday: Special chef's edition. What chefs eat on their days off or on the road. (Reg. req.)
+ Orangette. Wonderful food blog.
+ French women do get fat. What the bestseller neglects to mention.

Disenchantment

Tonight we watched Patrick Keiller's London at Tate Britain. Keiller's fin-de-siècle film tracks a narrator's meandering journey along the River Thames -- from the City, through the Wembley suburbs, to the markets of Brixton -- during the tumultuous and low-point year of 1992: the year of John Major's election as Prime Minister, a spate of IRA bombings, the Black Wednesday

European monetary crisis, and the "fall of the house of Windsor". The film is rooted in a long literary history of the capital and references London's many chroniclers, such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, H G Wells and Horace Walpole.

The London depicted here during the Tory years is overwhelmingly one of decline, isolation, failure and disappearance: in one shot, a huge, inflatable Ronald MacDonald bobs alone above a burger joint; in another, blinds flutter in the wind through the blown out windows of a bombed City office block. However, the film does identify moments of comfort and liveliness, such as in the suburbs of Wembley, or the hustle and bustle of the Brixton and Stoke Newington markets and Brent Cross shopping mall.

Beautifully melancholic, though very much rooted in the social politics of a particular time. As Screen Online points out:

"Nearly ten years after the film's release, London is a different city. A Labour government has given it back a governing body, and new social architecture. The Millennium Bridge and Tate Modern have reshaped London's face, and [the narrator's] worst predictions have not come true."

Afterwards, we ate in Brixton's wonderful Eritrean restaurant Asmara, where the owners remembered and asked after my parents who ate with me there last year!

Related link:
+ Patrick Keiller profile

Sushi heaven

Tonight we ate again at my favourite Japanese restaurant, Fujiyama in Brixton. We had a mixed platter of vegetable (sweet potato, courgette and red pepper) and prawn tempura; spinach ohitashi (steamed and lightly dressed spinach with toasted sesame seeds, fried shallots and spring onion); a sushi and sashimi bento box; and freshly squeezed fruit juice.

Japanese is one of my favourite meals to eat out and no matter how much I eat, it never fills me up to the point of discomfort. I'm curious to make sushi, but I suspect it would not be an easy process. However, it would be fun to have a sushi-making evening at home with friends.

According to Wikipedia, sushi -- made up of rice, rice vinegar and fish -- made its first written appearance in a Chinese dictionary in the 3rd or 4th century BC. In Japan, the first written record of sushi appeared in 718. According to Eat Sushi, "In the 7th century, Southeast Asians introduced the technique of pickling. The Japanese acquired this same practice which consisted of packing fish with rice. As the fish fermented the rice produced a lactic acid which in turn caused the pickling of the pressed fish." It wasn't until the 15th century that Matsumoto Yoshiichi of Edo (Tokyo) introduced rice vinegar to sushi rice. Sushi and sashimi (raw fish) became "fast food" in the 1820s, when Hanaya Yohei set up a sushi stall in Edo.

A basic sushi pantry should consist of:

• Sushi rice –- "sushi rice" is best, but any premium short grain white rice can be used
• Nori –- dark green (almost black) toasted sheets of seaweed
• Rice vinegar –- non-seasoned; this is the key ingredient of sushi vinegar made from water, rice vinegar, sugar and sea salt
• Soy sauce
• Wasabi –- a spicy green mustard paste
• Pickled ginger -- meant to be eaten between servings to freshen and cleanse the palate
• Sashimi-grade raw fish -- such as tuna, salmon, yellowtail, eel and prawn

How difficult could this be?
+ Making sushi. Handy one-page guide to download (PDF).
+ How to make sushi according to Kuro5hin. The comments are the most useful.

Mo Ca chill

A friend from Oxford was in town tonight so we arranged to drink (amaretto sours, berry vodkas) in Brixton's Dogstar to begin with, but it was so cold, we couldn't bring ourselves to leave until late. Luckily for us the Dogstar now has a restaurant upstairs -- the Caribbean Mo Ca.

The food was average but filling. We started with aloe (potato) pies with tamarind sauce and callaloo (spinach) fritters with cucumber, mango and lime chutney; then a grilled chicken with fried plantain, coleslaw and "Spanish rice" for one main course, and chicken with tamarind sauce, pineapple and mango chutney plus "Spanish rice" (tasted like pre-flavoured Uncle Ben's to me) for another. Mo Ca is probably better for lunch or else after alot of evening drinking.

Along with the Queen, the Effra and the Duke of Edinburgh, the Dogstar is one of my favourite places to drink. In fact, there are so many great places to eat and drink in Brixton, I don't know why I don't hang out there more often.

Related link:

+ Urban 75's guide to Brixton. The only guide to Brixton you'll ever need to consult.

Other links today:

+ Engineers devise invisibility shield. "The key to the concept is to reduce light scattering. We see objects because light bounces off them; if this scattering of light could be prevented (and if the objects didn't absorb any light) they would become invisible. The plasmonic screen suppresses scattering by resonating in tune with the illuminating light."

+ The real world behind James Bond. "Documents and photographs released by MI5 have given a fascinating insight into the real-life intrigue which inspired James Bond's creator Ian Fleming - from exploding fountain pens to human torpedoes."

+ My own private Tokyo. William Gibson in Tokyo -- an old article, which I've been re-reading since starting Idoru.

+ Disneyland with the death penalty. William Gibson in Singapore. Another, even older article.

+ The $1,000 omelette. Made with lobster and lots of caviar.