Go outside, it's a nice day, life is short

This cartoon from Too Much Coffeeman really brightened up my day first thing this morning when it arrived in my email box. Reading it made me considerably less stressed at the amount I had to cross off my To Do list (well, not a single list as such but a collection of post-its and bits of paper that only I can make sense of, luckily). I luxuriated in the thought of spending the day in the park basking in the sunshine and heat. Before guilt and a sense of responsibility set in. A few minutes later. In lieu of sunshine and nature, I've plugged myself into my Walkman for the entire day in order to block out the usual noises of an open-plan office. Loretta Lynn, Audioslave, Gorillaz and the BBC are my facilitators in getting things done today.

I saw War Of The Worlds last night and, despite my initial trepidation due to the high irritation factor of Tom Cruise, I enjoyed myself considerably and was gripped for the entire duration of the film. Though surely I can't be the only one who thought the little girl -- Dakota Fanning -- was as freaky as the aliens?

After

After the bomb attacks, after spending the rest of the day in the office watching BBC News 24 and listening to Five Live, after texting furiously to ensure everyone we knew was safe, after pouring over the A To Z wondering how we would be able to walk back to our homes, after realising little actual work was being done, I left early and arrived home with little energy but to wolf down my ultimate comfort food -- a big plate of greasy chips, slathered in salt, malt vinegar and tomato ketchup -- and spent the rest of the evening glued to the TV news, trying to fathom it all out.

The next day, Friday, I was in central London, having taken a bus that was busy, but not packed. The streets were quieter, devoid of suited people but not of tourists. Many offices -- mine included -- had sensibly told their staff to take the day off or work from home. People were shopping, people were eating, people were taking photos, people were riding on the top decks of double-decker buses. I did some banking then went into Borders to read.

Early in the evening, we popped into Chinatown and filled our basket with pak choy, soy sauce, prawn and pork dumplings, noodles, broth, jasmine tea, papaya, cherries, green tea cake and chocolate cake. When we returned home, we prepared a delicious Chinese meal and ate it whilst pouring over the newspapers. After, we laughed at Woody Allen's Hannah And Her Sisters on DVD.

Yesterday, a group of us checked the Transport For London website and worked our various ways on buses and overground trains to St Albans -- a pretty suburban commuter town on London's outskirts. There, we spent the day relaxing outdoors in the sunshine and playing with assorted babies at the house of two friends. We all had stories to tell of being caught up in the events of Thursday, so we shared them early on. Then we spent the rest of the day discussing babies (trying for them, giving birth to them, living with them), relationships (ditto), the G8 Summit, the politics of the Live8 concert (and the UK Government's co-option of it and the entire Make Poverty History campaign), climate change, and the lives of various celebrities as featured in a copy of Heat magazine that was floating around. Much food was scoffed, much wine was quaffed. We didn't return to London until after midnight.

Today, the two of us had a long and leisurely Full English breakfast at Brixton's The Lounge, perused the papers, reading the post-bombing analyses but lingering over other stories from around the world, the cultural reviews and, of course, the Food Monthly magazine (I had always thought people blew the dangers of MSG up out of all proportion!).

After, we sat, as usual, on the top deck of a double-decker and travelled to the Hayward Gallery and the interesting and mixed Rebecca Horn exhibition, then walked across the river in the blazing heat and sunshine to glance across some very bland photos of bored American teenagers at the Photographers Gallery. We juiced ourselves up, at Leon on Carnaby Street, with freshly-squeezed ginger and lemonade, read the papers some more, then took the Tube and bus home.

Many of the people I know were upset and angry, but not puzzled at the events of Thursday morning. We felt there had been a sense of inevitability about it all, after 9/11, after Madrid, after the Iraq war... We knew we would be a target eventually, the question remained when. Some of us recognise that as Londoners, we are angry... and as bombers, so are they. We're also aware that the atrocities of Thursday morning occur on a daily basis across the world, and on far grander, more devastating scales. We are hurt and angry, but... The awareness of the various political and historical complexities around and contexts of the bombings does not nullify, but does moderate our anger somewhat.

"Every time these dreaded events occur, you find yourself disintegrating, one part deep human compassion for the victims and their families, another calling you to the truth that our governments too shed blood for no good reason and create conditions for hate to infect life." Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The Independent, 08 July 2005.

After Thursday morning, life carries on.

London bomb blasts

Six bomb blasts in London, but myself, friends, colleagues and family are safe and okay.

Radio ga ga

Having finally had enough of eating junk over the past few hectic days, I decided to dust off my pots and pans last night and cook myself something healthy and delicious. So I baked a sweet potato omelette in the oven and ate it with steamed baby carrots and green beans. My work colleague suggested that ground dill and turmeric worked perfectly with eggs and sweet potatoes, and she was right. I'll post the recipe up to my recipe archive soon.

In between work, cooking, eating junk and reading fluff, I've also been enjoying my new (well, a few weeks old) 20GB digital Sony Walkman.

Before I bought it, I thought I would immediately load it with my favourite music -- the music I've never gotten bored of listening to for most of my adult (and in some cases most of my teenage) life: David Bowie (first and foremost), Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Richard Wagner -- the classics according to Planethalder.

And yet, when I actually got it home from the store and juiced its battery up, I found myself loading it with some unexpected choices. My new player gave me the opportunity to revisit the old and forgotten, and acquaint myself with the new.

Things I loaded onto my Walkman:

• Old music (music I haven't listened to in a long while): John Fogerty, Blondie, Elmore James, Patti Smith, Grandmaster Flash, Alison Krauss, Robbie Robertson, John Cale, Donna Summer.
  
  
• New (to me) music: Ill Mariarchi, M.I.A., Orishas, Yat-Kha, Rachid Taha, Loretta Lynn.
  
  
• Cheesy music: Thompson Twins, ABC, Hall & Oates, Adam and the Ants.

One of my friends, who usually listens to a lot of contemporary global dance music, has loaded her iPod with Joni Mitchell, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Gordon Lightfoot. Another has loaded hers with Geri Halliwell and Dolly Parton!

But it's not just about music. When I think about what I've listened to during the day, it's more likely to be a non-musical podcast than music. For me, the joy of a digital player is being able to listen to a variety of broadcasts that I would never usually be able (either because the broadcast is on or streamed at an inconvenient time, or because I can't find it easily).

I use a beta version of Odeo that is so easy to use (subscribe to podcasts then every time you boot your computer it automatically downloads the most recent shows, ready for you to load on to your player) that I sometimes get overwhelmed by how frequently my favourite podcasts are updated and how little time I have to listen to them all.

Here are the podcasts I listen to most frequently:

• Word Nerds: a weekly podcast about language. Recent episodes have explored the language of war ("duck and cover", "iron curtain", "brinkmanship"), and food metaphors we use in the language of love ("sweetie", "honey", "cookie"). Each episode also features a "rude word of the week", such as the origins and uses of "prick" and "balls".
  
  
• IT Conversations: interviews or lectures on all things IT, including, recently, talks by theorist and Creative Commons creator Lawrence Lessig and The Sims creator Will Wright.
  
  
• In Our Time: a BBC Radio 4 documentary series that explores the history of ideas in the fields of philosophy, science, literature, culture and religion. Recent episodes have included paganism in the Renaissance, the philosophy of beauty, and the origins of all life.
  
  
• From Our Own Correspondent: features personal reflections by BBC correspondents around the world. Recent reports have included child sex rings in Cambodia, an Israeli football team in the Gaza Strip, the Slow Food movement, and Rome's disappearing shops and cafes.
  
  
• Science Friday: a weekly science, technology, and environment programme on NPR. Episodes still on my player include discussions on earthquakes, Einstein's relativity theory, sunscreen, and popular mathematics.
  
  
• Suicide Girls Radio: For a little light, ahem, relief (perhaps NSFW, but then most of you probably know this).

Fluffed out

I've been working flat out, shuffling between home and office, all weekend, so am using the little spare time I have to read. Not dense, multi-layered, door-stopping classics, mind. No, my brain right now, filled as it is with the complexities of work issues, needs light and fluffy, frothy and shallow -- books with pastel or primary-coloured covers: Jane Green's Babyville, for example, or Tony Parsons' Man and Wife, or Matthew Barrowcliffe's Girlfriend 44... And boy, is it easy to read them at lightning speed. If I stick just to froth-lit, I could more than triple my lifetime reading total easy.

Still haven't finished work for the night, but when I do, I might also flop out in front of Annie Hall or Six Feet Under.

Hmmm, actually, what I feel like for dinner are some Batchelors super chicken noodles, a Cadbury's creme egg, some Rowntrees fruit pastilles...

Update at 11:45pm: I ate the noodles, the candy and also, for my sins, the cold baked beans with frankfurters, bacon bits and kidney (Heinz London Grill) straight out of the can as I watched Woody Allen's Annie Hall. I haven't seen this movie in a while and it cracked me up over and over. Some great lines. Now I want to see Hannah And Her Sisters again -- one of my all-time favourite films -- but don't own a copy of it. Might have to nip out to the shops tomorrow.

Annie Hall: Oh, you see an analyst?
Alvy Singer: Yeah, just for fifteen years.
Annie Hall: Fifteen years?
Alvy Singer: Yeah, I'm gonna give him one more year, and then I'm goin' to Lourdes.

Annie Hall: Sometimes I ask myself how I'd stand up under torture.
Alvy Singer: You? You kiddin'? If the Gestapo would take away your Bloomingdale's charge card, you'd tell 'em everything.

Alvy Singer: Those who can't do, teach. And those who can't teach, teach gym. And of course, those who couldn't do anything, I think, were assigned to our school.

Alvy Singer on sex: It was the most fun I ever had without laughing.

Alvy Singer and Annie Hall in California:
Annie: It's so clean out here!
Alvy: That's because they don't throw their garbage away, they turn it into television shows.

Alvy Singer: There's an old joke. Uh, two elderly women are at a Catskills mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know, and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.

Alvy Singer to Annie Hall who has asked him if he loves her: Love is too weak a word for what I feel - I luuurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you, two F's, yes I have to invent, of course I - I do, don't you think I do?

Alvy Singer: I was thrown out of NYU my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final, you know. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me. When I was thrown out, my mother, who was an emotionally high-strung woman, locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose of Mah-Jong tiles. I was depressed at that time. I was in analysis. I was suicidal as a matter of fact and would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian, and, if you kill yourself, they make you pay for the sessions you miss.

Annie Hall in frustration at not seeming sophisticated and smart around Alvy when they first meet: La-di-da, la-di-da, la la [just how I feel around guys I like!]

I could go on and on, the lines in this movie are so razor-sharp.

Quotes from here, and here, and, of course, here.

I'm off to bed, now, a happy girl.

Something fishy

Yesterday, I popped into Carluccio's Caffe in St Christopher's Place for an al fresco lunch and had a deliciously fresh insalata di fagiolini e calamaretti: a salad of red wine marinated baby squid with new potatoes, green beans and sun-dried tomatoes. I read a novel while trying, unsuccessfully, not to eavesdrop on the work couple next to me gossiping about their colleagues and opining on every person and the way they dressed that passed us by. Afterwards, I had a caffe latte and the creamiest and tartest torta di limone I've ever had.

For dinner, I met up with a group of people for a friend's birthday at Clapham Junction's charming, cosy and pretty Fish in a Tie restaurant. I had a starter of asparagus wrapped in smoked salmon, a main dish of hot seafood salad -- hot baby squid, king prawns, mussels, salmon and monkfish on a bed of raw spinach -- and a dessert of refreshing watermelon.

Conversation meandered from speed-dating (would we, wouldn't we) and travel plans (hiking in Provence, cycling in the Cotswolds, luxuriating in Thailand) to New Labour versus Old Labour (our generation versus our parents'), Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes ("What are they doing together?" "He freaks me out." "She's good for him." "His teeth are too big." "Mid-life crisis and sugar daddy syndrome.") and The Economist's online presence (a good number of techies among us).

My friend may have just turned 28, feeling rather old, and noticing wrinkles around her eyes that are not there, but she looked truly amazing under the gilt-edged mirrors, candlelight and glowing chandeliers.

Then, at the end of the evening, my honey, who is in Madrid for a week, texted me to say he had just eaten a huge plate of king prawns, langoustines and crab for dinner. I think I would have been rather jealous were it not for the remarkably fishy day I'd had myself.

Right, it's nearly 7pm on a Saturday and I'm just leaving the office after an intense but productive day of work. Gonna crawl into my bed with some fluffy literature, Heat magazine, and a big bag of Peking Spare Rib & Five Spice-flavoured crackers. I really feel like being a slob tonight.

PS: The layout of the lefthand column -- with my listening, reading and watching lists -- has skewed. I have no idea what Typepad have done. Something fishy perhaps. Hopefully it will be sorted out by tomorrow's end.

My regular blog reads

The astute among you will have noticed that I've radically updated my blogroll. I rarely have the luxury to read all the blogs in my RSS newsreader these days, but I always make time for these listed below.

Virtually all the blogs I read are set outside London; in many cases they are set outside a city. I read them to learn about lives unlike my own: to live and love in rural environments, to engage in passions -- such as music playing and sailing -- that I've never tried, to cook up a storm where I always end up eating out, to grow vegetables where I buy mine from a store. These are individuals who write unlike me: thoughtful, detailed, lengthy expositions on whatever take their fancy. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Petite Anglaise: This English ex-pat in Paris has just left the father of her child and is embarking on a new love adventure. Life as a mother and girl-about-Paris.

The Cassandra Pages: Thoughtful meditations on life in Montreal from a former naturalist; her writings exhibit a strong and beautiful sense of place.

Knäckebröd: This ex-New Jerseyan writes about her daily life with her beau in Sweden with intimate detail. Another blog with a strong sense of place; oh, and she's as obsessed with food as I am.

Meanwhile, Here in France: Another English ex-pat and classical musician writes with beauty on life in Provence with her painter husband and on her life on the musical road.

Old Grey Poet: This gay British poet and painter in his 60s writes about the minutiae of his daily life in suburbia -- from struggling with his internet connection to visiting Tesco -- with dry humour and sarcasm.

Stay of Execution: Musings on sailing, life with her dog, nature, relationships, the legal profession and technology, from a sailor and lawyer from Portland, Maine.

This Fish and Greek Tragedy: Hilarious real-life Sex and the City gals let loose in Manhattan.

Eclectic: Delightfully wordy reflections on life in Inuvik, in the Canadian Arctic, and on politics.

Orangette: Orange nutmeg muffins, triple chocolate scones, the delights of fish sauce, zucchini and pecorino frittata, and all things food. I salivate every time I read this blog from a Seattle-based foodie.

Hypatia Avenue: Life in London for newly-engaged 20-something Hypatia. This is one of the first blogs I ever read and although she rarely posts anymore, when she does it's always a treat.

Please check out the rest of my blogroll, to the right.

Wondering where my daily links went? Wonder no more.

Bits...

A quick post as things are manic at work. On Monday, I relaxed at home reading Coetzee's Disgrace and watching the third season DVD of the quirky and dark Six Feet Under. Television has rarely been this good. In fact, since Desperate Housewives ended I haven't switched on my TV except to watch DVDs. I missed the BBC's Doctor Who, so I am looking forward to seeing this on DVD soon.

Tuesday was another fun and lively evening with old (but not that old, in case any of them are reading this) Oxford friends -- one, who is lecturing in Cork, Ireland, I've not seen in years. We had drinks in my favourite Alphabet Bar in Soho, then a gluttonous dinner at Masala Zone off Carnaby Street. We gorged on saag aloo, lamb rogan josh, lamb korma, Goan prawns with coconut, spicy masala prawns, chapatis and rice. Over beer and wine, we chatted about work and children and, of course, caught up on all the gossip of mutual friends not there to defend themselves: who was going out with who, who had split up with who, who was pregnant, who, who who... We also compared gadgets: my lone digital Sony Walkman with their various iPods, for example. Lots of talk of politics, lobbying and passing bills through Parliament, as some of us work, in various guises, in this area.

On Wednesday, after drinks with work colleagues, sitting outside enjoying the warm weather, I headed into town to watch the rather good Batman Begins in perhaps the noisiest cinema I've ever been to (lots of crisp packets being rustled, whispering, people getting up to go to the loo, popcorn munching) -- the Marble Arch Odeon. I had never seen a Batman film, but much like my experience seeing my first ever Star Wars -- Star Wars 3 -- recently, I really enjoyed "discovering" how Bruce Wayne became Batman.

Tonight, I'm going to enjoy a rare night in. I think I'll spend it reading again. This week I bought lots of chick- and lad-lit from my local, very excellent charity shop: Jane Green, Tony Parsons -- lots of wonderful fluff to immerse myself in over the coming weekend when I will be busy working in the office on both Saturday and Sunday and so won't have much time or energy to both read anything complicated or go out.

I'm sorry -- to myself most of all -- that my posts always seem to be lists of things I've done. I wish I would make time to reflect more on what I've done and who I've done it with, but I'm always in a rush to get the posts out before I have to get on with my day (or get to sleep). When I used to keep a paper journal (since I was 11 all the way through to 2000), I always made time to think through the things I did and thought. I gave up journaling when a major illness made me realise that I spent far more time than was healthy for me self-analysing my life and not getting on with living life to its fullest. But now I've scuttled too far in the opposite direction.

Slices of life

The past few days have gone by in a glorious food- and art- and music-laden whirlwind. Our Oxford reunion dinner at a friend's house in Pimlico on Thursday night was alot of fun, catching up with all our lives -- something we do so rarely even though we're all based in London. The food was simple and delicious: a selection of salami and olives, gala melon and feta, roast vegetables and mozzarella, rye bread dipped in olive oil, nuts, chocolate, wine and iced tea.

Music was streamed in through the stereo from someone's iPod -- music I hadn't heard for years, such as Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Alison Krause and Creedence Clearwater Revival. The same thing has happened since I've bought my digital Walkman: I've loaded it with music I haven't listened to in a long while and with new-to-me music from MP3 blogs such as Tofu Hut and Moebius Rex.

Perfect food and music for the humid heat.

On Friday, I returned to the Urban Retreat spa in Aveda, Covent Garden, for a body treatment -- the Salt Glow. For an hour and a half, my body was exfoliated with Dead Sea salt minerals then covered with a herbal clay mask, after which I was left to fall asleep surrounded by candles and soothing music. After my shower, the therapist smothered my freshly-glowing skin with a customised moisturiser. Then I lingered over vegan, gluten-free, sugar-free, wheat-free, egg-free carrot cake -- moist and yummy -- and a ginger and peach herbal tea in the Aveda cafe.

The spa treatment was a wonderful treat from my partner, who I met for cocktails in low-lit, romantic The Player bar in Soho, where we drank Pisco Sour and a sublimely refreshing Grapefruit Julep made from grapefruit juice, vodka, honey and passionfruit juice. Then we ate a colourful dinner of Chinese broccoli and shitake stir-fry; scallops with baby squid, prawns, seaweed and red chillis; and a "jungle red curry" of chicken and aubergines in the excellent and heaving canteen-style Thai restaurant Busaba Eathai on Store Street.

We also visited the hypnotic, lush and passionate Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Tate Modern -- the first Kahlo exhibition in the UK. Kahlo was one of my earliest idols when I was a teenager (I discovered her via Madonna); one of my earliest means of imaginative escape whilst stuck in drab suburbia. More on this exhibition later.

On Saturday, we had a quick snack of dim sum and a Venezuelan beef sandwich at Camden Lock Market, then walked along the very spare stretch of Regent's Canal to London Fields, passing some interestingly-designed modern and old warehouse-style apartment blocks. We had planned to continue on along the canal to Limehouse, but got waylaid by the Turkish menu at the Cilicia cafe: tabbouleh, chicken wings, baked rice pudding and Turkish coffee. After a quick wander around the busy Farmers' Market on Broadway and a stroll through London Fields park, thinking what a great place this would be to live if it was better connected transport-wise (ie a Tube line and more buses), we took the bus back into town for a browse around the shops on Oxford Street and a recuperative berry smoothie and cucumber with orange juice at Leon off Carnaby Street.

In the evening, we made a spontaneous decision to listen to some music we had never heard before, on the strength of a Time Out piece. We cut through Soho and Charing Cross, crossing the River Thames to the Queen Elizabeth Hall to purchase tickets to a concert by Russian-Mongolian throat-singing punk rockers Yat-Kha and bluesy Saharan Touareg revolutionaries Tinariwen, as part of Patti Smith's Meltdown festival (she was singing -- with Flea and others -- the entire Horses album next door, but by the end of the evening I was glad we hadn't been able to get tickets months ago, as amazing as her performance must surely have been).

Not knowing what to expect as we took our seats, both bands were a revelation. Tinariwen were fighters in the Touareg insurgency against the Malian government and formed in 1982 in Colonel Ghadaffi's rebel camps. Their music is bluesy, spare and weathered, and underpinned with hard-hitting electric guitars, bass and drums.

But it was Yat-Kha that held me spellbound. The lead singer out-Waited Tom Waits, with a voice so deep and throaty that every hair on my head was electrified. Against a surging electric guitar, punchy bass, pounding drums and violin-like wail of a traditional Mongolian instrument, the lead singer's voice was a bone-shaking "subterranean rumble" that growled its way through a selection of covers including Motorhead's Orgasmatron and Hank William's Ramblin' Man. Their rendition of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart (MP3 file) was so haunting and disturbing that I nearly cried (the first time in years a live song has brought tears to my eyes).

The covers feature on their latest album, Re-Covers, and Yat-Kha recorded them as a tribute to the days when pop and rock music was illegal under Communism. As the singer, Albert Kuvezin, told a MOJO journalist over a meal of salty intestines and mayonnaise:

"At night, you could hear American or European radio stations, but it was really hard to get records this far from Moscow. Tuvan members of the Red Navy or students might come home with something. The first album I had was a double by Led Zeppelin from Japan. Eventually, you could go to yurts and find nomads and shepherds who had given the albums pride of place on a shelf next to a bust of Lenin. The only record label in the Soviet Union, Melodiya, released pop and jazz eventually, but only things the state approved of. The real interest [for us] was in the bootleg tapes and the home-made fanzines that explained what was happening outside."

Amazing stuff.

Listen to MP3s of Yat-Kha songs

Today, after a leisurely morning playing around on the internet, we headed out to the ICA for beer, cider and olives in the bar and then a viewing of the Japanese movie, Café Lumière. This homage to director Yasujiro Ozu is a meander through slices of life of twenty-something, pregnant Tokyoite, Yoko. Despite there being virtually no plot, the camera takes us through the minutiae of her daily life -- eating food, drinking milk in coffee bars, travelling around in trams and trains, chatting with her family and friends, having morning sickness -- with such fluidity and focus that, despite being rather sleepy at the end of the weekend, I was slowly drawn into the subtle and restrained narrative.

Then it was off for a dinner of broccoli and garlic, beef in black bean sauce, and deep-fried squid at Chinatown's rather good Hong Kong Diner.

Phew, what a weekend, what a long (my longest) post. Perhaps tomorrow I'll get back to reading Disgrace.

Lots more

Our work picnic in the park yesterday was lovely. Lots of good cooks so lots of delicious homemade goodies to eat such as lemony humous, asparagus and sundried-tomato quiche, mozzarella pizza, cucumber raita, vegetable samosas, baklava and flapjacks. Lots of wine, lots of beer, lots of sun and shade, lots of chilling.

Despite being very sleepy after our afternoon deep chill, I met a friend in a heaving and uncomfortable Leicester Square. We grabbed a salad and corn muffin from the cafe in the brightly-painted oasis Neal's Yard and then watched the movie We Don't Live Here Anymore, in which two couples commit adultery with each other with such dispassionate and intellectual coolness that the film ultimately makes for a rather bland and unengaging viewing. As Roger Ebert opines, "we yearn for more edge, cruelty, psychological wounding, slashing sarcasm, sadistic button-pushing". Afterwards, we ate ice-cream in Soho and caught up on each other's lives.

Tonight, more catching up will be had when a group of us who had all studied together at Oxford will gather for dinner. More wine, more beer, more food, more chilling. I love the Summer.

On a roll

Yee-haw, I've found a book as absorbing as Auster's Oracle. Uninspired by all the books waiting for me to read them at my house, I wandered into a charity shop close to my work and found this book -- a first edition hardback for just £2 -- tucked away in a dark corner: J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, which is about a professor from Cape Town accused of sexual harassment and forced to retreat to his daughter's isolated smallholding in the bush. I know something horrifyingly violent is about to take place in the plot and I'm just turning those pages. The trouble is, I'm already over halfway through it and the hunt for another rivetting read will resume, probably as early as tomorrow.

My partner gets through a book (or two, or three) a week and, on the strength of my sudden reading spurt, suggested -- only partially in jest I think -- a reading competition. My reading luck may not last, I fear, so perhaps I shouldn't jinx it.

What a glorious day. My work is taking this afternoon off for a picnic and sunbathe in the park. I might slink off to another part of the park to carry on reading.

Mourning

This is something that happens so rarely that I have to write it down for posterity (or blogsterity at least).

I've been reading Auster's Oracle Night at every opportunity since Sunday.

I read during my lunch break at work yesterday, instead of working through; I saw a movie (the cheesy but incredibly sexy and surprisingly entertaining Mr and Mrs Smith with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) and had an evening work meeting sitting outside a pub; I returned home and resumed reading; I awoke this morning and began reading. But now I'm in mourning because I've just finished the book. What the hell am I going to read now that is as good?

One thing's for sure, ever since I realised I perhaps have only 552 books left to read in my lifetime, I shall start but discard any book that doesn't grip me obsessively within the first 20 pages.

I came to the 552 figure on the basis of my appalling 1-book-a-month habit. But if I refuse to struggle through duller books then I should be able to at least double that figure.

Scorching oracle

This weekend's heatwave was completely wasted on me as I spent all of it inside:

Yesterday, I was in Birmingham on work business all day and didn't manage any time outside save for walking from my house to the Tube at 6:30 in the morning and walking to and from the work venue. When I returned to London in the evening, I ate inside at Ravi Shankar Indian restaurant when really we should have had a picnic dinner outside in Regent's Park.

So today, I resolved to loll around under a big tree in long grass reading the Saturday and Sunday newspapers and listening to the superlative BBC Radio 4 podcasts -- From Our Own Correspondent and In Our Time -- on my digital Walkman.

But then, from 9 o'clock in the morning, I began Paul Auster's latest novel Oracle Night, sitting in my apartment with a soft breeze and dappled sunlight streaming through the trees and in through my open window, and quickly found myself lost in Auster's world well into the evening.

The only breaks I had were for a delicious lunch of rice with lobster dressed with ginger, garlic and hot Ghanaian pepper made for me by a friend who had bought the sweet and meaty lobster -- live and £10 each -- from Billingsgate Fish Market at 5:30 yesterday morning; and another for a simple dinner of succulent red grapes and peppery Milano salami. But even these I ate with a fork in one hand and the book in the other.

Having started and failed to finish too many books to mention over this year, I can always count on an Auster plot -- more thrilling than any thriller I've ever read -- to carry me completely and obsessively through from beginning to end.

Comments alert: My dad has added his childhood memories of the monsoon season in India to my entry, below, on the start of the monsoons.

"I still remember the first day of the rains used to start with heavy noises from the sky as if God had declared war on humankind. We used to be so excited we ran outside, shouting, screaming and dancing and singing in the rain. ... We used to play truant from school. On return home we used to face our loving, caring but dictator Mum standing with a bamboo cane in her hand to give punishment for missing school and making ourselves wet. Then returning to school, we faced the angry teachers. We promised them and Mum that we would be very good boys from tomorrow. But come the next day, we repeated the same exciting game."

Happy Father's Day, Dad, I love you!

R 'n' R

Finished work early today for some R 'n' R (rest 'n' relaxation) at the hands of an Urban Retreat therapist at the Aveda skin and hair centre in Holborn. I'll spare you the gruesome details of my facial -- needless to say it involved a lot of extractions -- but the oils, creams, head and shoulder massages, candles and New Age music left me blissed out and chilled. Afterwards, I hung around the Aveda cafe, sipping freshly-squeezed carrot, orange and parsley juice as I dreamily perused the pages of a Lonely Planet guide in anticipation of our proposed trip to Thailand this August.

It's rare that I treat myself in this way and make the time to look after my skin and body. It's not very English to pay attention to the details of grooming -- skin polish, nails, hair texture -- but I'm trying to develop the habit. Because it feels so damn good.

In India, we always made the time to oil our hair and skin. My grandfather used to oil his body every morning before his morning bath. His skin was like a baby's to the day he died. My grandmother used to oil and brush her hair on the veranda of her house -- which is how my grandfather first spotted her. Those of us who could afford it visited the beauty parlour (yes, they were called that) too for regular skin and henna hair treatments. When my friend was preparing to get married, one of the first instructions she got from her aunt and other women of the family was how to maintain the condition of her skin with herbs such as turmeric. (She was also given other most useful advice!) I felt very feminine in India.

I was met at the cafe and we stuffed ourselves with plates of scampi and chips and rock and chips under baskets of geraniums hanging from trees outside The Rock and Sole Plaice chippy on Endell Street. Then we strolled down in the evening heat to the South Bank to experience another kind of R 'n' R (rock 'n' rai) courtesy of Algerian-French rock firebrand Rachid Taha at the Royal Festival Hall, as part of Patti Smith's Meltdown.

Since the 80s, Rachid Taha has careened through post-punk, reggae, rock, hip hop and rai to produce, tonight, a molotov cocktail of militant, edgy, raw, dangerous, furious and declamatory sound. Music with attitude, much like The Clash. In fact, Taha recently recorded a tribute to Joe Strummer, Rock el Kasbah, in which he seamlessly mixed the familiar Clash riffs with North African influences, and lo and behold Mick Jones and Patti Smith both joined Taha on stage tonight and rocked out to an explosive rendition.

A wonderful finale to an exhilerating evening, marred only by the fact that so many photo opportunities were lost because I had forgotten to bring my camera.

Koba

The first time I ate Korean food was at Bi-Won last year. I loved the Korean emphasis on pickles and chilli, lightly-steamed vegetables and thin slivers of beef: a perfect blend of Chinese and Japanese foods, but without the cloying sauces of the former and overt simplicity of the latter. So I returned again and again, sometimes for lunch, sometimes for dinner.

But Time Out alerted me last night to another quality Korean restaurant tucked between Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road on Rathbone Street. Koba is a brand-new barbeque restaurant, opened only a couple of weeks ago by a woman whose family already own several restaurants in South Korea. That's her on page 44 of this week's edition!

She's like the mother hen of a busy brood, tending to her customers with attention and care: serving our food (men first, by cultural habit, she laughed when she realised), cooking our bulgogi (marinated sliced beef sirloin) on the grill embedded in our table, placing them on our plate when they were done, showing us how to dip them in chilli sauce then roll them up in a lettuce leaf with plum sauce and spring onions. She also served us spinach lightly cooked with sesame seeds, kimchi (pickled cabbage), fat, glossy noodles and steaming leaf jasmine tea.

We took our time over the food as the decor was so soothingly minimalist: industrial-style metal pipes extracting the BBQ smoke away from each table and doubling as lights, muted brown wooden bar and tables, white tile flooring, glass ceiling, cream walls.

Can't wait to return.

Monsoon!

The monsoons in Kolkata have started. Look at the jubilation expressed in that man's up-stretched arms!

Photo from The Hindu via Under the Fire Star.

Long lost music

"Zabriskie Point was to be Michelangelo Antonioni's greatest triumph, a crowning achievement in an already seminal body of work and a bold affirmation of his commercial ascendance in America. It was to be the Italian-born director's state-of-the-epoch address, a provocative document of the political injustice, civil warfare, and extreme moral and cultural polarities defining the end of the 1960s. Zabriskie Point was to be nothing less than Antonioni's portrait of the United States -- and by extension, Western society -- at war with itself. But just about everything that could go wrong with the project did go wrong, and Antonioni's great dream would prove to be his worst nightmare." Sci.Fi.

We saw this movie at the NFT last night and despite being visually stunning (the parched California desert with its wide open vistas and technicolour skies looks monumental) it was stilted and cliched. However, it did boast some wonderful music, including The Youngbloods' Sugar Babe, Roscoe Holcomb's I Wish I Was A Single Girl Again and Pink Floyd's Country Song.

Having finally bought my silver, teeny, tiny 20Gb Sony NW-HD5 MP3 player (and a pair of Sennheiser PX200 headphones) in the afternoon, I rushed home to rifle through my CD collection and transfer to my player some music I haven't listened to in years.

This may take a couple of months...

Wandering into green

And so wander out into green I did. Yesterday I took the Tube to Putney Bridge and walked several miles along the south bank of the River Thames to Richmond. Apart from a deluge of power walkers, joggers and cyclers hurtling past me between Putney and Hammersmith, and despite being a Saturday, I was overwhelmingly and blissfully alone.

At the beginning of the journey, my mind was busy chattering away with itself. After an hour or so, however, its only awareness was the rhythm played out by the movement of my legs, the crunch of the earth as my feet pounded the dirt track, the singing conversations of birds, the rustle of the wind through leaves, and the green space and flowing water around me.

After several hours of movement and silence, I was in dire need of re-fuelling. And at Richmond I hopped back on the Tube for a deliciously meat-laden dinner at the excellent and very busy Turkish restaurant Antepilier on Green Lanes.

A wonderful day of restoration that has left me feeling incredibly chilled even into Sunday. I need to do that more often.

Links today:

+ Nuptials. The wonderful mating rituals of eels, cranes, lizards and wasp moths.
+ Dates in Star Wars. A chronology of the Star Wars world eg 3900 BBY -- The planet Naboo is colonized by settlers from Grizmalt.

Chilly

The day's warm weather led us optmistically to eat dinner outside at Goya -- a teeny, tiny, teeming Spanish tapas bar tucked away in a nondescript sidestreet in Pimlico. Over conversation ranging from the varieties of HIV education in India to the varieties of committed relationships, we tucked into a very delicious meal of gambas al ajillo al pil pil (prawns in olive oil, garlic and chilli), sardinas a la plancha (grilled sardines), albondigas (meatballs) and fabada (sausage and bean casserole), mopped up with lots of crusty white bread and butter and robust Campo Viejo Rioja. But of course, being England, the weather turned very chilly and I was already calling it a night and legging it to the warmth of the Tube by 10pm. Shame on me.

I need...

The things I need right now are slow, soft kisses; long, gentle embraces; to be enveloped in the arms of damp, green trees and the scent of freshly-mown grass; to gaze out of the window, daydreaming of anything and nothing; to sit and watch the world go by with no need to engage; to wander aimlessly; to wonder aimlessly; to see and hear running river water; to trace the path of a trickle of rain down my window pane with my finger; to doodle without feeling guilty; time out; stillness; silence.

Like father, like daughter

Took the last few days off work to keep my father company as he accompanied my mother -- on a conference -- to London.

Poor man bore the full brunt of my bossy, short-tempered and easily-bored nature as I dragged him from one museum to the next in South Kensington: the photographic exhibit of Robert Scott's final expedition to the Antarctic at the Royal Geographical Society; the space, mathematics and computing exhibits plus the breathtaking Space Station 3D IMAX movie at the Science Museum; and the haunting Face to Face photography display of ape portraits at the Natural History Museum.

He got his bossy, short-tempered, easily-bored revenge yesterday, though, when he forced me to sit in Borders bookstore all morning helping him work through the exercises for the word processing course he is taking, and then dragged me all over Soho, where he used to work, to see his old haunts and murmuring -- sometimes appreciatively, sometimes sadly -- "London has changed, London has changed". [Update: when I called them just now to check whether they had arrived back to their home safely, my father took umbrage at me describing him dragging me around Soho: "But whenever I said, 'Go left', you turned right. Whenever I said 'Go right', you turned left!" The story of our relationship, I think.**]

In the evenings, my mother joined us and the three of us indulged in our love (craving, addiction, obsession) for food: a Chinese all-you-can eat buffet in the industrial wastelands of Park Royal, where my parents were staying; South Indian vegetarian at Ravi Shankar near Euston; and Turkish/Lebanese kebabs and tabbouleh at Shish in Bayswater.

In all, a lovely time was had. Though we have our familial ups and downs and each one of us are stubborn as hell, we're lucky to get on so well.

Photos

** A few instances when my father said "Turn left" and I turned right:

• When I decided to study social science A levels rather than science. My father didn't talk to me for six weeks.
  
  
• When I decided to take two consecutive gap years between my undergraduate and graduate degrees: one working as a checkout clerk in Sainsbury's supermarket, the other teaching high school in India.
  
  
• When I turned my back on an academic career in favour of new media.
  
  
• When he realised I have never dated a Bengali (not even an Indian) and may very well never marry one.
  
  
• When he reads on Planethalder that I've been out all night again.

But he never fails to say "I'm proud of you", at least three or four times a week.

Little wonder

The new 20Gb Sony Walkman is out. I handled/caressed/fondled it in a store on Tottenham Court Road the other day and was smitten, but am waiting for the 30Gb version to come out in a few weeks before I buy one. Smaller, sleeker, lighter, longer-lasting than the ubiquitous, plasticy and frankly girly-looking iPod, I can't wait!

Related links:

+ Tech Digest description
+ Engadget's Sony and iPod size comparisons

Hothouse

"Better never to lay eyes on a man, never to have seen one. Ever since I was a child, I've been frightened: the look of men, yoking up the oxen, picking up sacks of wheat, calling to each other, their thick voices, their thick boots. Every time I passed, fear of their hands, of their touch. God made me weak and ugly. It's his way of keeping them away."

After a lovely dinner on Friday night -- of smoked sausages, black beans and rice, plus chicken in tomato and red pepper sauce with rice -- sheltering from a torrential downpour at Canela in Covent Garden, we walked across the River Thames' roiling currents to the National Theatre to see David Hare's adaptation of Federico García Lorca's vivid and claustrophobic The House of Bernarda Alba.

The play is set under the oppressive shadow of Catholic morality and against the backdrop of the stifling rise of Franco's fascism in Spain in 1936. It focusses on the tortured relationships within an all-female household, between the newly-widowed and monstrous matriarch Bernarda Alba ("a twisted old gecko" whose housekeeper would "happily thread hot needles through her eyeballs with my own hand"), her two female servants and her five unmarried daughters: unattractive Angustias, assertive Magdalena, bookish Amelia, resentful Martirio, and flighty Adela. Each daughter is a prisoner of her own repressed sexual urges, fighting for the attentions of an unseen Pepe el Romano -- seemingly the only marriageable man in town -- whose masculine presence is the only means of quenching, in Adela's words, the "fire coursing through my legs".

Repressed love, thwarted passion, desperate yearning, torrid melodrama: my kind of soap opera, though the last third dragged a little as I got tired of the daughters' relentless histrionics and hysteria. My favourite characters by far were the decisive Bernarda and the forthright housekeeper.

I enjoy the theatre and should go more often. I really love Peter O'Toole's description of theatre as a living, ephemeral thing:

"Oh, it's painful seeing it all there on the [movie] screen, solidified, embalmed. Once a thing is solidified it stops being a living thing. That's why I love the theatre. It's the Art of the Moment. I'm in love with ephemera and I hate permanence. It's more than behaviorism, which is what you get in the movies... Chrissake, what are movies anyway? Just fucking moving photographs, that's all. But the theatre! Ah, there you have the impermanence that I love. It's a reflection of life somehow. It's...it's...like building a statue of snow...."

Related link:

+ Full text of the play in Spanish

Other links today:

+ BBC's Beethoven Experience. All 9 symphonies for download in MP3 format from Monday 6 June.

+ New Scientist's 11 steps to a better brain. All to do with eating Marmite on toast for breakfast and omelette and salad for lunch, getting enough sleep and positive thinking, apparently. Curiously bland article lacking in any concrete science.

+ The well-read life. "Never force yourself to read a book that you do not enjoy. There are so many good books in the world that it is foolish to waste time on one that does not give you pleasure and profit." The more books you discard half-finished, the more you will read fully.

All I want to do...

Have been busy, out and about after work: seeing films (the fabulous CGI world of video game, whoops sorry, movie Star Wars 3 -- my first ever Star Wars film, believe it or not -- on the truly wonderful Leicester Square Odeon screen, and the dreamy but distressing Mysterious Skin); eating good food (Korean at my favourite Bi-Won and Chinese at the cheap and tasty Cafe De Hong Kong); seeing art (Peter Doig, Luc Tuymans and Marlene Dumas shine in an otherwise bland The Triumph of Painting show at the dark and oppressive Saatchi Gallery); going for walks (along the South Bank). But when I come home to write about it, all I want to do is read (the gripping Every Dead Thing by John Connolly) or sleep. Still haven't got round to seeing the last two episodes of Desperate Housewives yet, either. Tonight we're seeing Lorca's The House of Bernardo Alba, adapted by David Hare, at the National Theatre, but no doubt you'll not get to hear about it until next week.

Here are some links instead:

+ Green Cine's movie primers. The how-to, what-the-hell-is, best-of primer of all sort of movie genres from Adult to Anime via Bollywood and French New Wave.
+ The Omnivore: Learn to eat everything
+ Watching TV makes you smarter
+ Mindfulness over matter. Familiarity with things breeds liking, not contempt.
+ The BBC asks do blogs have anything to say. Mine certainly doesn't, but it serves as a useful reminder to myself of the things I do (rather than the things I feel).
+ How to become an early riser: Part 1 and Part 2.
+ Info-mania dents IQ more than marijuana, says the New Scientist.
+ Concentrating while studying

Strolling the canal

Returned to London from my parents' house in East Anglia on Sunday evening and saw the wonderful Abbas Kiorastami film The Wind Will Carry Us at the NFT. This funny and beautifully shot film follows a film engineer and his crew as they travel from Tehran to the remote Kurdish village of Siah Dareh on an unspecified mission to do with a sick woman.

Towards the end of the film, the protagonist meets an elderly doctor who lectures him on the glory of creation. According to him, death happens when "you close your eyes on the beauty of the world". Though I've only seen two, it seems to me that Kiorastami's movies are less about grand narrative and more about noticing the beauty of the world, from the yellow cornfields whizzing by through a car's windows to the gnarled trees standing isolated on Iran's rugged and desolate terrain.

Inspired by Diamond Geezer's excellently detailed account of his walk along the length of London's Regent's Canal -- 8.5 miles from Paddington to Limehouse -- we decided yesterday to walk along just a small segment of it, from Little Venice to Camden Lock. Despite being a Bank Holiday there were very few people on the towpath, and it had just rained before we arrived, so everything was brightly lush and green, and incredibly peaceful. At the end of our journey we ate delicious chicken kebabs and Thai squash curry at Camden Lock market. Can't wait to walk the 6.5 mile stretch from Camden to Limehouse.

Photos of our stroll

Being nobody, going nowhere

Going to the theatre, visiting a gallery or eating out constitute a break from routine for many people.

For me, a break from routine is relaxing in my parents' garden in East Anglia, listening to the buzz of bumble bees and the whoosh of the wind through conifer trees, basking under the scent of a thousand flowers exploding from terracotta pots -- rust-red camellias, creamy marguerites, hot pink azaleas, blue lupins, orange dahlias, white lillies and purple heather.

A break from routine is also eating good home-cooked Indian food -- in this case, curried cauliflower, and spicy chicken with spinach and coconut. And watching goofy TV such as a 23 year old accountant's clapped out 1985 Ford Econoline van being transformed into a spectacularly flashy pornmobile complete with red velvet seats and a hot tub in MTV's Pimp My Ride! And need I mention Big Brother?

I've been spending a couple of days away from London and all its work and play freneticism, recharging. Sitting still, thinking no thoughts, going nowhere, being nobody.

The challenge, I realise, is to experience these feelings in the midst of the bustle of my regular life.

Other link today:

+ Gardens of Glass: Dale Chihuly at Kew Gardens. Can't wait to see this: what a perfect setting for Chihuly's exquisite work.

Pull the trigger

The pistol hairdryer (via Popgadget). I'm veering between jumping up and down feeling appalled (perhaps not one for mommy to use in front of sonny) and jumping up and down in excitement (I want, I want).

Though I must admit to loving Philippe Starck's rather gratuitous 18-karat-gold Kalashnikov lampstand.

Histrionic gingerbread

"James Dean is a mass of histrionic gingerbread. He scuffs his feet, he whirls, he pouts, he sputters, he leans against walls, he rolls his eyes, he swallows his words, he ambles slack-kneed—all like Marlon Brando used to do. Never have we seen a performer so clearly follow another's style. Mr. Kazan should be spanked for permitting him to do such a sophomoric thing. Whatever there might be of reasonable torment in this youngster is buried beneath the clumsy display."

Thus spake the New York Times when the movie East of Eden premiered in 1955.

Having loved James Dean (one of my earliest girlhood crushes -- along with Jack Kerouac, Sam Shepard, David Bowie and other long dead or old people) and his movies (all three of them) throughout my childhood, I was excited to see East of Eden for the first time on the big screen last night at the NFT, and for the first time in widescreen.

The larger-than-life view magnified so many of the flaws I loved: the moralising script, the melodramatic soundtrack, a mumbling, barely coherent and self-conscious Dean, the naive psychoanalysis (I'm bad, because Daddy doesn't love me).

As wonderfully cheesy as I remembered it.

The cinema was packed with a far more eclectic crowd than I had expected. A good mix of young and old, from smart elderly couples to shabby students. Alas, no Dean look-a-likes...

Weekend in the life of my feet

I put my shiny, new, pampered feet to good use over the weekend by stomping them up and down staircases with boxes and bags, helping a friend to move flats.

I'm not that much of a tyrannical taskmaster though. I allowed my feet some respite from time to time:

On Saturday afternoon I treated them to hanging out at the Beaconsfield bar on Green Lanes for the Arsenal v. Manchester United match. My feet were Gunning for Arsenal of course, even though the team didn't play as well as United. In the evening, my feet lounged around at a friend's birthday party in The Lounge in Brixton, where we got cornered by a man moaning about the reasons why he couldn't finish his PhD -- without realising that he was surrounded by three of us who had -- and about the company I work for.

On Sunday, we were still moving things, but managed to find time for a leisurely big fried breakfast, including bubble and squeak, at a cafe in Pimlico and later some delicious baklava dripping honey in the Antepilier cafe on Green Lanes. We always find time to eat.

We took the night off from boxes and dust to watch Abbas Kiarostami's wondrous Taste of Cherry at the NFT, featuring the enigmatic and morose Mr Badii driving round the barren hills above Tehran, giving lifts to men he hopes will bury him after his suicide. The film focusses on his encounter with three men with different philosophical views on suicide and death. An absorbing masterpiece of subtlety and humour.

Despite the respites, my feet and I were exhausted by the end of the weekend. I think tonight I will lie in bed all evening and catch up with Desperate Housewives and the weekend's newspapers.

Related link:

"I have too much respect for my audience to tell them complete stories," Abbas Kiarostami tells The Telegraph. "I want them to be involved in the narrative process, sharing the director's chair with me, so I leave my films half-made."

Retreat

Yesterday, I joined the throngs of London and jostled my way down to the basement of the National Gallery's Sainsbury wing to view the Caravaggio exhibition. The 16 paintings on show had been created during the last four years of his life in exile after fleeing Rome, where he had killed a man in a duel in May 1606.

Most of the paintings are Biblical: David with the Head of Goliath, The Flagellation of Christ, a young St John the Baptist, the beheading of John the Baptist, the Raising of Lazarus, for example. Under Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio's brush, however, the religious subject matter is fabulously lusty, sexy, violent and even a little profane.

Many people have criticised the show for the crepuscular exhibition space, with its oxblood and slate-coloured walls and minimal lighting. But I found the darkness enhanced the passion, violence, drama and intensity of Caravaggio's work.

Of course, Caravaggio's major legacy was a whole new vocabulary of light: the radical contrast between shadow and light, framing each dramatic moment, that created a potency unparalleled in earlier art. And it is this luxurious interplay of light and dark that struck me most today.

The luxury continued when I went to Harrod's Urban Retreat spa to replenish my energy with an indulgent pedicure, involving all the trimmings plus a wonderful foot, ankle and calf massage with aromatherapy creams.

The spa was so noisy with the babble of voices and R&B, though, that any hope I had of being able to slip into a coma of relaxation as the therapist pampered me quickly slipped away. Therapists -- male and female -- gossiped about work and play, a wedding party of three chatted excitedly about the Big Day this weekend, and a besuited man still wearing his sunglasses took business calls on his mobile throughout his treatment. At one point his pedicurist bizarrely mentioned that men rarely have pedicures unless they are gay, to which the business man equally bizarrely spent 5 minutes reiterating he wasn't gay.

The pedicure was heaven though. I now have glossy red toenails and supersoft feet.

Afterwards, I was met in Harrod's food hall and we picked out a delicious selection for our dinner, including lemon almonds, corn nuts, the sweetest and most succulent mangoes I've ever had (costing -- gulp -- £12.49 for two -- which we only realised were so expensive as they were being rung up at the till), supersweet strawberries and some pastries.

Related links:

+ He lived badly, brutally. The Guardian sets out to see every known Caravaggio in existence and discovers a brawling, philandering gangster who created some of his greatest work on the run and wanted for murder.

+ Caravaggio in pictures

+ Caravaggio gallery

Streets of shame

A few years ago, American artist Susan Hiller was wandering through Berlin when she came across a street sign: Judenstrasse, or Jews' Street. On journeying through Germany, she discovered 303 streets preserving the memories of former residents who had only recently been killed. Judenstrasse, Judendorf, Judentreppe, Judenhoflein.

Surprised and shocked, Hiller embarked on an obsessive three year journey, photographing and filming each and every street, from bustling cities and bland suburbs to snowy farmland and leafy lanes, so that the histories would forever remain visible. She then drew an annotated map, marking every Judengasse, Judenweg, Judenpfad, Judenhain, Judenbackel and others in the entirety of Germany, from Aachen to Zerbst.

Viewed in isolation, the images are quite mundane, but packed tightly together in the Timothy Taylor Gallery on Dering Street, so many questions rise up in the viewer. Were the street names ever torn down like their namesakes? Who were these Jewish communities living in isolated villages in the countryside or the busy cities such as Munich or Berlin? What were their unique and personal experiences? What do the street names mean to current residents, if anything?

More questions arise watching the accompanying film entitled The J Street Project. For 67 minutes, the video camera focusses on different "J-streets". Some are devoid of any movement but leaves rustling in the wind or the sun setting behind the horizon; others feature people blithely cycling along, having their hats blow off as a juggernaut hurtles past them, or waiting at a railroad crossing in their cars. You wonder if they are even aware of the history of the streets they are moving through; if they look up at the street sign and reflect upon its significance to German history.

"These signs commemorate something, but who remembers it?" Hiller told The Observer. "Nobody. All of my work deals with ghosts in a way that some people see and some people don't. Now the signs are seen as respectful, but what do they commemorate? A history of racism and segregation."

Overall, the senses provoked in me were disquiet, unease and absence. However, my mood considerably perked up upon leaving the gallery when David Hockney walked in and opened the door for us. We were both stunned into silence and couldn't even say thank you! Blond and wearing a light-coloured trench coat, he looked fit, agile, tanned and much younger than in his photos.

A little shell-shocked by this fleeting encounter, and grinning like loons, we could move no further than the end of Dering Street, where we tumbled down into Fiesta Havana for a hearty meal of corn chips with red chilli, coriander and lime salsa; gaucho steak with blue cheese and fire roasted corn; steak burger bound with spicy chorizo; and Corona beers, strawberry caipirinha and raspberry mojito.

Music to my ears

My musical weekend began with a trip to Oxford to see Canadian "gay messiah" Rufus Wainwright perform at the New Theatre. Usually I love Wainwright's grandiose and melodramatic warblings, but in Oxford on Friday the sound was so appalling that Rufus' adenoidal drawl ricocheted painfully around my skull and the instruments blurred into a single, flat noise. Sack the soundman, I say.

The monotony was only relieved in the last 15 minutes, when the very cute Rufus exchanged his respectable shirt and suit for a buttless sequined thong, lipstick red stilettoes and blue stockings as Miss Oxford.

But even this frivolity couldn't beat the real highlight of my night, when I returned with my friend to her house in Summertown and she made us chocolate fondue with organic strawberries (at last, strawberries that taste of my childhood rather than of water). Scrumptious.

On Saturday, we enjoyed a moorish stew of smoked sausage, black beans and rice, followed by a gooey carrot and orange cake at the wonderful Brazilian-Portuguese restaurant and bar Canela in Covent Garden. Then we crossed the river to hear fadista Mariza sing her soulful brand of Portuguese fado at the Royal Festival Hall.

Fado ("fate") perhaps developed out of the Portuguese presence in Brazil during the 19th century, as a blend of African slave rhythms, traditional music of Portuguese sailors and Arabic influences. Linked to the word saudade and embodying nostalgia, longing, sorrow, loss, love and happiness, this mournful music typically features lyrics such as, "Why did you leave me, where did you go? I walk the streets looking at every place we were together, except you're not there." The Portuguese Blues, indeed.

29 year old Mariza is often billed as the current crown princess of fado, which is the main reason I wanted to experience her melancholia live. Born in Mozambique and of mixed parentage, she grew up in a traditional neighbourhood of Lisbon, surrepticiously listening to the amateur fadistas who sang weekly in the smoky, dark confines of her parents' cafe. She herself began singing at 5 years old.

On Saturday, she swayed across the stage in a long and black diaphanous dress, wrapped in a traditional black shawl, with her trademark helmet of bleached, cropped hair glowing out of the dark. Flanked by musicians -- also swathed in black -- playing violin, cello, Spanish guitar, Portuguese guitar, acoustic bass and an adufe drum, she sang with the strength of a woman twice her age. She doesn't quite have the depth, range and passion of a diva such as the Cape Verdean Cesaria Evora, but she is very close.

A wonderful performance that had me swinging between elation and sorrow all evening.

Related link:

+ Fado figures. Mariza and Portugal's other female fadistas.

Exuberance

This painting by Marc Chagal, exhibiting the sheer joy of existing, perfectly captures my mood right now. Joyously and outrageously life-affirming.

For a variety of reasons, I haven't had a chance to write much recently. I had a fabulous lamb-laden Turkish meal on Green Lanes last night where all the waiters wore Turkish football shirts, but otherwise, since returning from Spain, have simply been relaxing reading and kicking back with friends at home.

Tonight, though, I'm off to Oxford to see Rufus Wainwright in concert, and tomorrow it's back to London to see beautiful Portuguese fado singer Mariza at the Royal Festival Hall. Yipppppeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Sevilla

Seville was charming, romantic and seductive. We stayed in the Hotel San Gil, a beautiful four-star hotel in La Macarena district, complete with marble courtyard and tiled lobby.

We wandered around the monumentally Gothic Cathedral de Sevilla and the Moorish palace Alcazar. We spent an afternoon chilling in the Arabic baths, Banos Arabes, where we drank mint tea, luxuriated in a steam room, a salt pool and three other pools ranging from ice cold to hot, and basked under candlelight and Arabic music.

But mostly we meandered through the narrow, twisting, cobbled streets, stopping at whatever bar or cafe took our fancy. One of our favourite meals took place in Triana district on the Rio Guadalquivir which flows through the city. Triana is a fishing district and there we ate delicious dishes piled high with freshly grilled or lightly fried calamari, sardines, prawns, and clams, plus a refreshing tuna nicoise.

On other nights we ate gazpacho, garlic prawns, chorizo, jamon serrano (cured ham), black pudding, olives, beef steak, squid, whitebait, other fish, plus a stew of pork with dates and bacon at the tiny Cuban restaurant Habanita... In fact, mainly meat, fish and seafood.

We were rarely served vegetables to accompany our tapas or racions unless we specifically asked for them. Once we ordered a spinach and chickpea stew, and although it was tasty, the spinach and the chickpeas had obviously come out of a tin. And, despite all the orange trees growing on every street, we had to buy fruit (oranges and strawberries) from a store. An Atkins dieter's paradise!

We started our days with jamon serrano (cured ham) sandwiches, madeleines (small sponge cakes) or greasy and delicious chocolate con churros (deep-fried pastries dipped in thick melted chocolate), all washed down with freshly-squeezed orange juice and coffee.

And of course, lots of ice cold beers, mojito, caipirinha, and sangria. The best place for drinking was the run-down and buzzing Alameda de Hercules plaza of Alameda, where a younger and more alternative crowd hung out.

We didn't get to experience any flamenco or bullfighting, but then there's always next time.

Photos from our trip

Plaster casts

Cast Court at the Victoria and Albert Museum, May 02. More photos.

Frozen

On Sunday we saw Iranian filmmaker, artist, poet and photographer Abbas Kiarostami's Forest Without Leaves installation at the V&A. We drifted through a three dimensional forest composed of huge hollow tubes wrapped with photographic images of the barks of trees -- complete with carved Persian graffiti. The rationale behind the installation is that we are so out of touch with nature in natural surroundings that we can only observe it with care when placed and framed in an artifical environment. The effect was utterly haunting and mysterious.

We also viewed his Trees In Snow exhibition -- a series of photographs of stripped alpine stands of trees and their skeletal shadows silhouetted against winter landscapes that somehow manage to convey not bleakness and loneliness but beauty and serenity akin to Japanese pen and ink drawings.

Simply beautiful.

A season of Kiarostami films begins this month at the NFT and I'm very excited as it will be my first exposure to his work.

I'm off to Seville now, so won't be posting until next week!

Related link:

+ "Who is this 65-year-old Tehrani and why are the film, art, publishing and academic worlds so excited? According to the high priest of art cinema, Jean-Luc Godard: 'Cinema began with D. W.Griffith and ended with Abbas Kiarostami.' One American critic wrote: 'We don't know it yet, but we are living in the age of Kiarostami.'" The Times on Abbas Kiarostami.

Bank Holiday drifting

The long and humid Bank Holiday weekend began for us on Friday evening with drinks at Two Floors and Alphabet Bar in Soho, then dinner at the lively and packed Tex-Mex restaurant Cafe Pacifico in Covent Garden. We drank mescal and rosemary cocktails and devoured comfortingly cheesy ground beef burritos and quesadillas. The band Travis also sauntered in to eat, but I seemed the only diner to notice them.

On a hot and listless Saturday, I dragged us down to Bethnal Green and Bow for a disastrous few hours of "non-shopping", after which we had little energy but to sprawl across the grass in Green Park, along with the rest of London it seemed, and read the Saturday papers and people-watch. Rejeuvenated, we then wandered around Soho enjoying the summer evening, before devouring oysters, lobster and king prawns at the fabulous seafood restaurant Randall & Aubin on Brewer Street. We sat at the front of the restaurant by the open window, and as seafood juice dripped down our fingers we watched the very camp waiters air-kiss their friends who were passing by, and tried to work out whether the apartment opposite with the red light in the window and heavy drawn curtains was a brothel or not. We were nearly convinced when five or six Indian men leapt excitedly up the adjoining staircase, but then began to doubt when they leapt back down laughing a few minutes later.

Sunday was another chilled day, but this time largely spent working and surfing the net. In the evening, however, we headed back into Covent Garden to watch the fabulously witty Melinda And Melinda -- Woody Allen's return-to-form movie that convinced us to re-watch Manhattan, Annie Hall, Hannah And Her Sisters, and Crimes And Misdemeanors on DVD some time soon. This was followed by a filling but average Thai dinner back in Soho surrounded by male gay couples and a "suit" on a first date unsuccessfully trying to convince his female guest that affirmative action is a bad idea. Somehow I don't think she'll be putting his telephone number on speed-dial.

Today (Monday) we lazed around all morning reading the Sunday papers (bought the night before), then headed out to the V&A in South Kensington for Iranian filmmaker and artist Abbas Kiarostami's haunting and ethereal installation Forest Without Leaves and exquisite photographic exhibition Trees In Snow, more of which tomorrow. We also meandered through my favourite room in the V&A, the dank and decrepit Cast Courts cluttered with monumental and intricate Victorian plaster cast statues, altars, door frames and columns.

Afterwards, we headed back to the West End to watch the hilariously crude A Dirty Shame -- "Pope of trash" John Waters' new movie about sex addicts in the Baltimore suburbs, with Tracey Ullman, Johnny Knoxville, Chris Isaak, Selma Blair (complete with eye-knocking triple-Z cups) and Patty Hearst (yes, the one and only). Apparently, according to IMDb trivia, "When the MPAA were asked what would needed to be cut to obtain an R rating, they replied that if everything the MPAA objected to were to be removed, the movie would only be 10 minutes long." After 90 minutes of much-welcome cheap laughs, we ventured back out into the early evening sunshine to loll around the grass at St James' Park and plan our long weekend trip to Seville in a couple of days -- hurrah!

My God, when did April slip in to May?

My body senses summer approaching faster than my mind because it starts craving ice cream: anything from a cheap synthetic generic vanilla through Häagen-Dazs cookies and cream to Green and Blacks dark chocolate. So long as it's ice cream. Today at the cinema it was Häagen-Dazs panna cotta and raspberry. Bliss.

Free Flickr

Does anyone want a free Flickr Pro account? Hurry, while stocks last! Email me if you're interested.

Lolling around

A couple of evenings just lolling around.

Last night, browsing through magazines (Scientific American, Utne, Burn and Heat) and people-watching in Borders; wondering why all the Liverpool fans were chanting in Trafalgar Square at 6:30pm ("Have they lost their way?"); demolishing a hot Peri-Peri roast chicken and lemon cheesecake at Nandos; watching the last few minutes of the Chelsea v. Liverpool game on the street through a pub window; wandering past Buckingham Palace and down along Millbank wondering why St James' Park stays open all night ("Do they all stay open in central London?", and ahem hoping to catch a bit of action watching two guys walking through the park in the pitch dark) and which building is which (MI5, MI6?); flicking through Wired and Time Out magazines, curled up on the bed, sipping wild berry tea.

Tonight, savouring a juicy fruit salad (courtesy of M&S) for dinner; enjoying Rhys Ifans' creepy performance in Enduring Love on DVD; finally booking the Caravaggio show online; sinking into a rose-scented bubble bath, surrounded by candles; and now, after writing this, taking a novel to bed to fill my head with other worlds, other lives as I fall asleep...

Operation Pandora's Box

On 22 February 1974, paranoid and embittered office supply salesman Sam Byck shot and killed an airport security guard at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, stormed onto Delta Airlines Flight 523 and attempted to hijack and fly the DC-9 into the White House. When the pilots told him they could not take off until the wheel brakes had been removed, he shot them both, grabbed a woman passenger and demanded that she fly the plane. Of course, he was thwarted in his ambition to kill President Richard Nixon, and shot himself fatally in the head whilst still on the plane. Six months after the bungled assault -- codenamed Operation Pandora's Box by Byck himself -- Nixon resigned from office.

Director Niels Mueller has revived this footnote in history, and in The Assassination of Richard Nixon has produced a character study with a tightly-wound Sean Penn terrifically evoking the role of an alienated and socially-inept divorcee with a rigid notion of right and wrong and a life that is falling apart.

The would-be assassin's job is failing, his marriage is over, his children are sullen, he can't get a loan to start a tire business, his country is fighting in Vietnam, his President lies from every TV screen, and even his dog doesn't seem to care whether he is dead or alive. Penn's character blames all his problems on Richard Nixon's presidency, and becomes so frustrated with the little Dick -- "He made us a promise, he didn't deliver, then he sold us on the exact same promise and he got elected again" -- that he visits his local Black Panther office and tries to persuade them to rename themselves the Zebras and admit white members.

Penn's character will never be as bleak, compelling or provocative as that other obsessive loner De Niro's Travis Bickle, but the escapism this movie afforded me was just what the doctor ordered last night to help me through a particularly stressful couple of days. Of course, the peach bellinis we quaffed and salmon fishcakes we wolfed down afterwards at Galileo's helped lots too!

Reviews:

+ "Overheated and overacted, but very watchable for all that." Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

+ "There's no discernible point to 'The Assassination of Richard Nixon', no sense of larger purpose, the film has only craft and technique to recommend it." The New York Times (reg. req.)

Other links today:

+ On cruise control: How to get out of a life rut. "As human beings, we made it through the process of evolution because we're flexible and adaptable, so we are wired for change. When we're in a rut, it's another way of saying that we're not experiencing enough change or variety. It can be easier to stay with what feels familiar, rather than take the initiative to make adjustments. However, if you face your fears, experiment with new approaches, and then take consistent action, no matter how small the steps, you will feel a sense of empowerment and increase your confidence."

+ iPod killers? "Mobile phones that rock, jam, thunder, and swing are on the way. Wireless operators around the globe are working with music studios, phone makers, and artists in a sweeping effort to turn the mobile phone into a go-anywhere digital jukebox."

+ Knowing when to log off: Wired campuses may be causing information overload. "There's the real danger that one is absorbing and responding to bursts of information, rather than having time to think. What's only gradually becoming clear is not just a pragmatic drawback but an intellectual drawback to having so many trees that there's no possibility of seeing the forest." Surely this should be the point of Adbusters' Turn Off TV Week?

+ Why literature matters. "The percentage of Americans reading literature is declining. The decline in reading has consequences that go beyond literature. The significance of reading has become a persistent theme in the business world. The February issue of Wired magazine, for example, sketches a new set of mental skills and habits proper to the 21st century, aptitudes decidedly literary in character: not linear, logical, analytical talents, but the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative. When asked what kind of talents they like to see in management positions, business leaders consistently set imagination, creativity, and higher-order thinking at the top."

+ The holy war: Mac vs Dos by Umberto Eco:

"I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant.

"The Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach -- if not the kingdom of Heaven -- the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

"DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment."