Migrant Voices

Spent the evening in my old mucking ground Harringay, north London, watching the Banner Theatre's Migrant Voices production at the Kurdish Community Centre.

Combining music, song, theatre and video-taped interviews, the production draws parallels between the experiences of various immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers in Salford, north-west England: from the Irish coming to work in the city's cotton, transport, mining, engineering, timber and clothing industries in the early twentieth century, through the Jews fleeing fascism in the 1930s, the Yemeni people, and then, more recently, the Kurds fleeing persecution in Iraq.

Framing the drama is the story of an attack by a group of white youths on a Kurdish teenager and his father.

A debate between audience, Banner Theatre personnel and activists on the treatment in Britain of refugees followed, with numerous plugs for the European Social Forum events in London this weekend - a gathering of some 20,000 social and environmental justice activists from across the world.

Afterwards, we had a wonderful meal on Green Lanes - chicken kebab, bulgar and rice pilaf, lamb stewed with tomatoes and peppers, spinach in a spicy yoghurt sauce, aubergine baked with olives and apricots, spiced black tea and honey-drenched baklava for dessert. Oh, and lots of dark, heavy red wine.

Bloated links roll:

+ IPod users go into the closet. Link via one of my favourite gadgets blogs Popgadget.

+ "The reactionary stereotype of a Guardian reader is a person with leftist or liberal politics rooted in the 1960s, working in the public sector, regularly eating lentils and muesli, wearing sandals and believing in alternative medicine and natural medicine." Tee hee, well they got the first one right as far as I'm concerned (even though I wasn't even born in the 60s!). Superb Wikipedia entry for my favourite newspaper, The Guardian. Link via randomWalks.

+ Joke for nerds only: "One eskimo speaking to another eskimo. The first eskimo says, 'You'll never guess what. Those social software people have three hundred words for "friend".' From Interconnected.

+ "Email is one of the greatest things the computer revolution has done for personal productivity. Used improperly, it can also hurt your productivity. This article discusses ways to use email effectively. Then it goes beyond that and talks about how to be productive, period." The tyranny of email. Simply brilliant.

+ We're not humans, we're bacteria-human hybrids

+ Extraordinary and eloquent exchange between an Iraqi mother of 3 (and blogger) and an ex-US marine sniper.

+ Google desktop is here. But only for Internet Explorer and M$ Outlook users (so not at all useful for me who uses Firefox and - sorry - AOL Communicator). Via blog-God Kottke.

Killer bland

Despite having read No Logo, Shopped and The Good Shopping Guide, I still blithely make brand choices my more ethical self later cringes at.

Where I work, I am surrounded by independently-owned eateries from Italy to Eritrea, yet still, too often, I stumble in to Marks and Spencers for a factory-produced, plastic-wrapped and ultimately bland-tasting meal deal, which I then gulp down at my desk as I work.

Clothes shopping bores me, so twice a year I battle the crowds on Oxford Street and buy my generic high-street wardrobe (from The Gap to Top Shop), then retreat for a few hours of recovery time in bookstore behemoth Borders and its squeeze-out-all-the-small-coffee-shops-in-every-town Starbucks, wondering why I feel so unexcited about my purchases.

I firmly believe it's the small decisions we make daily that result in the big global changes, but I do not simply mean consuming for the sake of being ethical. Uninformed shopping makes us reliant on just a limited range of global brands; it dulls our senses and cuts us off from the richness, diversity and sheer excitement of choice. Real choice - offered by a diverse range of independent stores and stalls - is liberating.

Coca Cola is one such brand I unthinkingly consume, and a visit tonight to a lecture at University of London's SOAS on the impact of Coca Cola on local communities in India and Colombia has reignited my political awareness of brand consumption.

Coca Cola in India stands accused of depriving communites of water, poisoning groundwater and local vegetation with toxic waste, and poisoning people by having 30 times the acceptable level of pesticide and insecticide residues in their drinks.

Coca Cola in Colombia stands accused of gross human rights violations, where workers daring to unionise and organise are murdered, kidnapped, tortured and disappeared. There is currently a lawsuit against Coca Cola by trade union SINALTRAINAL working its way through the US court system for such abuses against Colombian workers.

The smallest thing I can do as an informed consumer is not buy Coca Cola products (Coca Cola, Fanta, Lilt, Minute Maid, Sprite) - a difficult thing for me as I actually love the stuff.

The by-product of this tiny protest should be the discovery of a wide variety of other drinks to consume, such as Whole Earth organic cola and locally-squeezed fresh juices (even Irn Bru!). This greater choice can only enrich my experience of daily life.

Related links:
+ The Qibla Cola path of resistance. London students are trying to fight the US hegemon through the drinks machine.
+ Ethical Consumer magazine
+ Fairtrade Foundation
+ Nike sweatshops
+ Behind the Label's sweatshop report (PDF)

As Tears Go By

Saw Wong Kar-Wai's first and most conventional movie, As Tears Go By, tonight. A straight take on Scorsese's Mean Streets and filled with genre cliches, it's the story of a tough Triad man Wah who has to look after his inept little brother and gangster-wannabe Fly, while falling in love with his ailing cousin Ngor.

Cheesy music (Cantopop version of Berlin's Take My Breath Away) punctuates classic gang battles and love scenes. It's a very 80s film, but worth it purely for seeing how quickly and brilliantly Kar-Wai progressed in his moviemaking.

But even this early on, Kar-Wai manages to subvert the usual images of non-stop, frenetic violence typical of modern Hong Kong movies, by introducing his now-familiar themes of the search for identity, urban alienation, and troubled romance.

And, as ever, Hong Kong is gorgeously filmed.

The next Kar-Wai movie we're seeing at the NFT is Happy Together, about two male Chinese lovers reaching the end of the literal and emotional road in Argentina.

Related link:
+ Hypatia Avenue's thoughts on Wong Kar-Wai. October 11 entry.

Other links today:
+ First space tourists will blast off to Bowie. How appropriate!
+ Tuna's red glare? It could be carbon monoxide. The mercury scare was bad enough, now this. What impact will this have on my sushi habit? Probably not a lot cause I have a sushi addiction, but eating it will certainly never again be a stress-free experience. Ignorance is bliss.

"Are you still talking about jobs?"

Spent a chilled day visiting friends in St Albans. St Albans is a pretty little commuter town that dates back to 20 BC, when a local Celtic tribe built its capital there. It was then invaded by Romans in 43 AD who renamed it Verulamium. This settlement was subsequently burned down by British queen Boudicca in 61 AD.

Unfortunately, the town has succumbed to the chain-store invasion with small independently-owned boutiques and bookstores being squeezed out by the generic likes of Monsoon, Marks and Spencers, Burger King, Carphone Warehouse, Cafe Rouge, Comfort Inn and countless realtors. Today, the town is largely populated by London commuters who have escaped the capital in search of better schools and safer, greener environments.

My two friends are one of these families who have escaped London "for a better quality of life". On the one hand they are perfectly conventional: table talk today focussed on such middle class, 30-plus-year-old preoccupations as mortgages, people carriers, pensions and DIY. At one point their 3 year old son came up to us and asked: "Are you still talking about jobs?" I replied, "No, honey, we're now talking about schools." To which he replied with disgust, "Oh, I'm going to go outside and play then."

We did manage to laugh at ourselves though. My friend said, "My God, we're turning in to our parents: we're thinking of buying nested tables for the living room." We groaned and she hastily added, "But they're trendy, acrylic, see-through nested tables!" Phew!

On the other hand, they're very unconventional. They're in a mixed-race (Bengali and Welsh), lesbian relationship and have two boys from two fathers through artificial insemination. One works with poor Bangladeshi families in Tower Hamlets and the other works on the Civil Partnership Bill that seeks legal protections for same-sex partnerships.

Okay, back to my conventional life: laundry, cooking, and paying some bills.

It's Good to be in D.C.

Those JibJab brothers have done it again. Here's the follow-up to the political satire sensation This Land. It's Good to be in D.C. stars our good friends John Kerry and George Bush singing to the tune of "Dixie". Guest starring Michael Moore, John Ashcroft, Jane Fonda and the vice-presidential candidates. Go check it out before it goes offline due to server overload:

It's Good to be in D.C.

Other links today:
+ Hi-tech smartens up to get the girls
+ Shiny shiny. My favourite girly gadgets blog that isn't girly at all. (Well, okay, some of it is: jewel-encrusted iPods, anyone?)

"Blog til you drop"*

There's a bloggers Xmas party coming up. I'm a blogging newbie - having only been blogging for two months - but I hope I can make this one.

* Blame last year's Guardian for that one.

Erotica in the city

So, lapdancing club Spearmint Rhino's fortunes are tumbling. I don't have much to say on the Rhino as I've never been, but did know a couple of guys who had, and remember them finding the club glitzy and kitsch in a tacky, 70s, gold-plated way.

The news made me think about the dearth of cool and trendy erotic clubs in the city - those aimed at a younger, artier crowd, rather than the usual sweaty, suited-businessmen and stag-party crowd. Something like the Skin II/Flesh events without the hardcore: mixed crowd, open and non-seedy ambience, chill-out zones, and good music. There are a few, but not enough.

Straight women get just as much erotic pleasure out of looking at male bodies as men do out of female bodies. This is where many erotic videos for women fail - they over-focus on the female experience. I'm sure a significant proportion of male gay porn is consumed by women.

So where are the lapdancing clubs for women who don't like the hen-party sweat-fests of Lap Attack, Adonis Cabaret and Full Monty theme nights at the local pub? If you know of any, please let me know.

Korean quickie

Had perhaps the nicest lunch meeting ever today. I really believe that the area around the British Museum is the best for small eateries in central London. Bi Won is a spectacular, tiny cafe-restaurant on Coptic Street that has had Time Out salivating for the last two issues.

Set lunches for around six quid. I ate miso soup with spring onions and tofu so soft it melted in the mouth but miraculously didn't disintegrate in the bowl; a spicy seafood broth with tofu and chilli; pickled chinese cabbage (kimchi); pickled bean sprouts; and, my favourite, bi bim bab, a stew of vegetables, beef and chilli paste on a bed of rice and a raw egg broken on top - which arrived at the table sizzling away in an earthenware bowl and which our sweet, adorable waitress then mixed all together for us (the heat cooked the egg as she stirred).

So nice to have a cheap(-ish) meal during lunchbreak that isn't Pret a Manger or Marks and Sparks. I'm going back again, and again.... and again.

Related links:
+ Korean restaurants in London
+ Guide to Korean food
+ Korean recipes

Other links today:
+ Where have all the intellectuals gone?
+ Popular criticism. Improving ourselves to death.
+ Where to go on the web if you love reading

Days of Being Wild

Tonight we saw Wong Kar-Wai 's tightly scripted and beautifully shot Days of Being Wild at the NFT.

Yuddy lives the reckless life in Hong Kong, relentlessly seducing then forsaking young women, before setting off in search of the mother who left him as a baby in the custody of a prostitute aunt.

The women in the movie are equally lonely and rootless, searching for but never finding an emotional anchor for lives that are in constant flux.

Despite the bleak existentialism of this and all Kar-Wai's films, the strong characterisation and superb performances ensure that we genuinely care for each and every seemingly unredeemable character.

Wong Kar-Wai stands apart from the mainstream Hong Kong movie scene you may be familiar with, and seems to have more in common with French cinema. The NFT is showing a season of his films this month. So what are you waiting for?

Silver surfers?

This weekend, I visited my parents in Lowestoft, Suffolk. I was helping them set up their brand spanking new computer and broadband connection. I guess the press would call them "silver surfers", but surely, as more and more older people are going online, this categorisation should be obsolete?

My father has only been online for a few months and is already listening to Bengali music from a Calcutta server and watching the BBC news via streaming media. My mother sent her first email two weeks ago, and is now emailing her family in India and her colleagues at work every day.

The internet is no big deal to them - it's quickly become just another tool for communication. If they don't single the internet out, why should we single them out?

Other links today:
+ Strange news from around the world
+ The European Dream versus the American Dream

I knew there had to be a reason Swindon was special, aside from The Office that is. The town has the most roundabouts in Europe. Here are six of them:

And here it is in action. And there are more. Sheesh. No wonder I can only drive in the US!

Other links today:
+ Vote for the seven wonders of London. I vote the Houses of Parliament for its gaudy, gothic splendor; and the River Thames for the sheer wealth of culture and diversity on both banks.
+ 50 fascinating things you never knew about the London Underground
+ Fonts for programmers. Now, I am a computer nerd, but I'm not this bad!

Gothic adventure

Today was the last day of the summer opening of the Houses of Parliament, and of course the tourist me went along for a tour. I've popped in and out of Parliament (that gorgeous, high Victorian gothic work of art by Pugin - gaudy, ostentatious and full of gold leaf, marble and solid oak) for work a good many times over the years, but have not taken a proper guided tour since I was a child with my politics-loving father. Enid, our tour guide, taught me a few things I didn't know before:

• In the UK there are 664 MPs for a population of 60 million, compared to just 435 House of Representatives in the US for a population of 300 million.
  
  
• Parliament houses 8 bars, none of which are open to the public and none of which are subject to UK licensing laws.
  
  
• Parliament is also called the Palace of Westminster because it was the principal residence of the monarchs of England from the 1100s until the mid-1500s. Henry VIII was the last king to reside there.
  
  
• The oldest part of the Palace of Westminster still standing is Westminster Hall which dates back to the 1100s, although Parliament's history there dates back to the late 1090s. The remaining Palace was burned down in 1834 and rebuilt in the high gothic style in the 1840s.
  
  
• Those MPs, Ladies and Lords may not be falling asleep on the job after all. Each leather bench has 4 or 5 amplified speakers embedded in its back. Some lean back into their seat to catch what everyone is saying. I prefer to believe most are catching 40 winks, though.

View photographs.

Incest, murder and electric guitars

Tonight, I saw Sam Shepard's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Buried Child at the National Theatre, with M. Emmet Walsh and Lauren Ambrose, among others, and accompanied by a live electric guitar score. Shepard excels at depicting characters caught between two worlds - a mythical past and a modernised present. When Vince returns to the home he has not visited in six years, no one seems to remember him - neither his bickering grandparents, nor his mentally-vacant father - much to the crazed bemusement of his girlfriend whom he'd fed with stories of an apple-pie dream of a childhood house. A fantastic cast, portraying with relish the fractious relationships between members of a normal, sorry, dysfunctional family in America's heartland, burdened by secrets of incest and murder.

Terrific performances, prefaced with an even greater one on the way to the theatre:

Companion: Do we have to see this play. Could we not go drink at the NFT instead?
Me (with the crazed glint of a fanatic in my eye): But Sam Shepard is a preeminent playwright of the American avant garde!
Companion: What?! That baffoon who couldn't even act his way out of the Pelican Brief and Baby Boom?!
Me: Er, yes...

Okay, so I exaggerate, but my friend was far less suspicious after the show.

Was I the only teenager who hung posters of Sam Shepard and not Simon Le Bon on her wall?

Related link:
+ Portrait of the artist: Sam Shepard and the anxiety of identity. Masters thesis (not mine!). For the devoted only.

Other links today:
+ The cult of Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time
+ Super Size Me sequel. Out in 2005.
+ The Magic Roundabout movie!

Transgressive love

Went to see Code 46 this evening and came away disappointed. The basic story follows an ID investigator (Tim Robbins) pursuing then falling in love with the fraudster (Samantha Morton). The individual elements of the film worked beautifully, but ultimately they failed to coalesce into a coherent, satisfying whole. The film had little context or detail, and I found it emotionally flat and a little dull.

But I'm not keen on dismissing it outright as there were numerous individual elements (visual, conceptual and structural) that worked for me and, I feel, will have me rewatching it when it's released on DVD:

- It's a futuristic movie, set in an alternative present governed by a unitary global force. Everyone speaks a global patois of English, Spanish, Italian, French and Mandarin Chinese. Due to the widespread practice of assisted conceptions and sperm- and egg-donated births, people from the same gene pool are forbidden to have sexual relations with one another.
- It is exquisitely shot - eery and ethereal, not edgy like usual futuristic films - around Shanghai, Dubai and Jaipur.
- Key themes revolve around alienation and dislocation, love and transgression, and the conflict between individual and global autonomy, and insiders and outsiders.
- Unusual for a sci-fi movie, Code 46 is short on special effects and plot and long on ideas and vision. It's grainy not slick, rough around the edges with an inconclusive ending, decidedly lo-fi, and the bad guys of the future are not aliens but ourselves.
- Morton and Robbins are endlessly watchable as individual characters, but not together - there's none of the oddly mismatched chemistry of Murray and Johansson in the stylistically-similar Lost in Translation.

Afterwards, we went back to eat in Asmara - a much more rewarding experience.

Related link:
+ Channel 4 review of Code 46

Other links today:
+ Bashing the McMasses. The inherent class snobbery of Super Size Me
+ Richard Dawkins' musings on "race"

Why I love Flickr

The internet's most empowering value lies in the ease with which new social connections are made. I'm not talking about closed social networks like Friendster, LinkedIn, Spoke and Orkut, which privatise the internet by requiring invitations to join, and focus primarily on who, not what, you know.

I'm talking about those ubiquitous networks in which connections between people, ideas and things are more freely made. These include email, public bulletin boards, chat, P2P, instant messaging, blogs (with comments enabled, of course), and even Amazon customer reviews. I love having the freedom to engage and participate whenever I feel compelled to, within networks of people I may or may not have met in person.

More and more people are using social networking applications in innovative ways. I've come across two examples in the past week. Most of you who read blogs regularly know that Flickr is no ordinary online photo sharing application. It has a photo annotation feature that was most recently and creatively used by Betrand Sereno to share his recipe for lemon pie. When you hover over each hotspot, the associated method pops up (screenshot above). Other peoples' comments vary from the difference between white and brown eggs, to how to make vanilla sugar. I love cooking and, a few years ago, put many of my family's Bengali recipes online, but it's a static site and I love the idea of doing it Betrand's wholly visual way and inviting comments for improvements and variations. Watch this space.

Another inventive use of Flickr is Prandial's "Flicktion" - in which photos of Florentine doorbells inspire and are appended by short stories. An idea that would be even more ingenious if commenters started reacting to, adapting and completely rewriting the stories. Ah, the social possibilities.

Related links:
+ Let's be Friendsters. Social networking sites are spreading like a rash through the internet, but are they sustainable?
+ The truth about why I hate Friendster

Other links today:
+ Please make my perfect cup of tea. Here's a pantone chart you can hang in your office kitchen so your colleagues can make your perfect cuppa based on your preferred pantone reference. Genius.
+ Hell is 57 varieties. Endless choice was supposed to herald progress, but it has only made us more miserable.
+ Space tourism. Sir Richard Branson is at it again.

Bits and bobs

Spent Sunday in Brighton, covering the new media side of the trade justice demonstration outside the Labour Party Conference. Some 6,000 demonstrators from across the UK turned up to voice their "fairer, not freer trade" message on behalf of a variety of campaigning organisations. Here is my "photomentary" of the day.

The UK has its first Islamic Bank. The Islamic Bank of Britain is based on the principles of the Sharia'a, or Islamic Law, which includes the belief that money has no intrinsic value and interest is forbidden. Money is accrued through equitable sharing of profits made through "legitimate trade and investment in assets". Fascinating.

Finally, three more things I’ve learned from the BBC this week:

1. The flatulence of sheep, cattle and other farm animals accounts for 25% of world methane emissions.
2. There are now more different kinds of cheese made in the UK than France.
3. Cancers produce certain odours, which dogs have been scientifically proven to have the ability to smell.

I'm still shaking off a cold, so I'm now going to curl up in bed and start a new book: Poppy Z. Brite's Drawing Blood.

Other links today:
+ Badly served: the isolation of country life
+ Forty years of The Sun. It actually started life as a leftwing newspaper.
+ Come on Barbie, let's go mobile. Mattel introduce Barbie with a mobile and instant messenger in India - and the mobile works!

Great Stone Face

Saw the wonderfully hysterical Our Hospitality (1923) at the National Film Theatre this afternoon - a rejuvenated print accompanied, at the side of the screen, by a live, improvised piano score by Andrew Youdell. Both adults and children in the audience were in stitches all the way through this feature-length adventure movie about a man who falls in love with the daughter of his late father's mortal enemy.

Even though Charlie Chaplin's Gold Rush (1925) is one of my all time favourite movies, it is the humour of Great Stone Face - Buster Keaton - that gives me the most satisfying pleasure. Unlike Chaplin, Keaton eschewed sentimentality and happy endings for bitterness, dejection, even death. His characters are existential heroes, deadpanning their way through stoic lives. He was the most silent of silent movie stars.

His biographer, Edward McPherson:

"Keaton was a man who prized subtlety and understood meaning in the flick of an eye, a momentary hesitation, a shift in weight, a motion half-begun. He underscored the big screen spectacle (cyclones, avalanches, stampedes) with the perfectly underplayed detail."

The NFT is fast becoming my favourite venue for movie-watching and I'm incredibly excited that it will be hosting, again, many of the films showing at the upcoming 48th London Film Festival (20 October - 4 November). October's going to be a busy month.

Right, I'm now going to spend the rest of the evening watching all my Buster DVDs. Uncork the wine and unwrap the Maltesers!

Related links:
+ How to make a porkpie hat
+ The International Buster Keaton Society
+ IMDb biography

Other links today:
+ Excuse me, can I have your seat, please? Subway etiquette and morality.
+ The history of the "ethnic" restaurant in Britain

"Heat" with balls

"Victoria just wants someone to be nice to her: Ms Waitress writes - 'Victoria Beckham is a regular visitor to Pizza Hut in Harlow. She only picks from the salad bar and drinks diet coke. She is so thin she looks like a child in a wig from the back. The kids run riot around the place. Victoria sits at the table not talking to anyone except into her mobile. The bodyguard acts more like a father-figure to the kids. She was overheard on a recent visit saying into her mobile, 'I just need someone to be nice to me today'. (FYI: Don't feel too sorry for Posh - she's a renowned tightwad who doesn't tip at Pizza Hut or at her hair and beauty salons.)"

"Illegal animal fights at Baghdad Zoo: Last year after conquering Baghdad, American troops got so bored they paid the keepers of the city zoo to let them go in at night and stage animal fights. Animals were a bit thin on the ground so they scoured the markets to set up bouts - i.e. five quails versus a wolf (victory: wolf). The big wash-out was a bear versus a lion. Apparently they 'just kind of looked at each other and circled round for a bit, then sat down.' Guess this all stopped when they thought up a more exciting game at Abu Ghraib."

Two reasons why everyone should join my favourite email list, Popbitch.

Under the weather

The seasons change and I get a temperature. No surprises there - half my office is ill. The only

good thing about getting sick is the excuse to lie in bed all day, alternating dizzy, snuffly sleep with large helpings of Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate (family size bar) and 3 or 4 novels.

Other links today:
+ Why do leaves change colour in the autumn?
+ Why do the seasons change?

Ladies of Brixton

Went for a lunchtime stroll round Brixton today and met some lovely local ladies. Come and meet them all.

Other link today:
+ History of the UK's 999 emergency number. Link inspired by Kottke's History of the US 911 number.