Book and film reviews, stuff about photography, geekery, plus Dan Sumption’s adventures in Sheffield and London.
Been enjoying a little name game havoc. Y’see, our newly merged company is not the first one to adopt the name “Leonardo”. For example, there’s these two – good thing we don’t have a French office, or we might get it raided!
In an expression of solidarity with non-profit organisations everywhere, I decided to buy the T-Shirt. Gonna have fun wearing it to meetings, or on other occasions when my NTK T-Shirts are too grebby to contemplate.
One result of the ongoing great loft clear-up of 2001 is that my tape collection is starting to be visible beneath the latest excavated geological layer. And buried in the current strata are – my me tapes! Tapes of me! Playing… stuff. Anything and everything amassed over 15 years of musical noodling.
Of course, 99% of them are atrocious musically, and the phrase “production values” doesn’t exactly spring to mind when listening to them. But what the hell, I started digging them out and listening to them and digging them anyway. Some real fun stuff there, from the early days of Peyote Fly the Chillum Egg (the original Light & Sound Department, who were the original Mystery Guests/Toxic Avengers [who never actually existed anyway] who, by way of a long break, were the original Gulch, who were the original Caustic, who were the original Cathy Ray… the first and last band I have ever played for) through all of my during & post-University experiments – the fluctuating personnel & random jams of the Adavasi, the flutey swinging not-quite-so-but-still-pretty-random jams of the Tommy Jazz Quartet, and the completely of the wall randomness-defined of my free jazz spats with Ed & other willing collaborators.
Took a stroll with a walkman (first time I’ve done that in ages) and had a wonderful time. Bought (yes!) a copy of Cool Edit so I could experiment with ripping cassettes to MP3… and set myself another task that will never be ended, there are so many of the fuckers, but I want to get some of these wee bursts of noise where I can catalog them (hmm… touch of the High Fidelities, I feel). Watch this space.
(I fucking hate it when something crashes as I’m in full literary flow. Start again… less eloquently).
Been doing some surfing, skipping around far too many sites which I really ought to name-check here. Read through my backlog of NTKs this weekend – favourite link was Lost in Translation. Had so much fun with this one translating things from English to “English?” – favourite so far is “The Visor Edge™ is available now at £329 (EUR 440) including VAT”, which becomes “The edge of the mold of the hour of the sun _ is _ available for the bathtub (329 EUR the 440) of including/understanding”.
Got enticed in by the bus ads for seriously.com ("seriously, I tried it once but I think I got away with it"). Some nice soundbites on there but as ever, reading long text on the web is a wee bit tedious, especially when it’s in a crunchy little Flash windows with naff scrolling and lots of greys on white which look like white on white on my laptop screen. I did particularly like the bit about "a picture’s worth a thousand words" being disproved by the three words "I love you".
Speaking of words, we’re doing some kind of chat up lines for Disney, and remembering the fun lines that used to be on the Durex website I thought I’d have a quick troll for interesting ones. Discovered this site which has a suitably large selection of crap and one or two amusing ones, including what must be the longest chat-up “line” ever:
Okay, so I came over here to ask you to dance, but I’m kind of concerned. I mean, we could hit it off really well, end up having a few drinks, next thing you know you’re giving me your number because I’m too shy to ask for it, I finally get up the nerve to call and we take in a movie, have some dinner, I relax, you relax, we go out a few more times, get to know each other’s friends, spend a lot of time together, then finally have get past this sexual tension and really develop this intense sex life that is truly incredible, decide our relationship is solid and stable, so we move in together for a while, then a few months later get married, I get a promotion, you get a promotion, we buy a bigger house. You really want kids, but I really want freedom, but we have a kid anyway, only to find that I am resentful, the sparks start to fade and to rekindle them we have two more lovely kids, but now I work too much to keep up with the bills, have no time for you, you’re stressed and stop taking really good care of yourself, so to get past our slow sex life and my declining self-confidence I turn to an outside affair for sexual gratification. You find out because I’m careless and a lousy liar, you throw me out (justifiably so) and we have to explain to the kids why mommy and daddy are splitting up. That’s just too sad. Think about the children. For God’s sake, if you dance with me and we hit it off, let’s just keep it sexual, because we both know where it’s going.
What else? Oh yeah, I always love a good blog site. Well, I was playing web-trumps the other day and I clicked off one of the cards onto Zannah’s site. Fun. I oughta try all those pointless tests myself (had a go at the sanity test and found myself a little more insane than Zannah, at around 69%).
Winston Churchill was fond of noting that the Chinese symbol for “crisis” is the combination of two characters: “danger” and “opportunity.” May you live in interesting times. I certainly am.
He also said “The optimist sees opportunity in every danger; the pessimist sees danger in every opportunity”. I’m busy trying to be an optimist – and succeeding 75% of the time (glass 3/4s full).
Dinner last night at Zaika – been meaning to visit for a long, long time. We tried shortly after it opened, but it was packed out after the recent media frenzy of recommendations. I saw it again a couple of weeks ago in the Independant on Sunday, featuring very high in their list of “top 50 places to go in 21st century London” (in fact, I think it was the highest placed restaurant).
Was not disappointed. Poppadums & chutneys were good – hard to excel with a simple poppadum, but these certainly couldn’t be faulted. For my main course I had spicy sea bass – small slabs of fish piled up with cous cous, floating in a yellow turmeric sauce with chilli-red blobs, and with julienne slivers of raw mango layed over the top. Awesome mix of flavours. For vegetable side dishes we had field mushrooms (stuffed with melted cheese and zig-zagged with a green coriander-y sauce) and mix of green beans, mange tout, baby sweetcorn and cashews, spiced with curry leaves and mustard seeds. To accompany we had pullao rice (heavenly) and peshwari naan (divine – the most awesome naan I have ever eaten, the soft coconutty bread almost melted in the mouth).
As if that wasn’t enough, we went for a dessert platter accompanied by a glass of muscat. Deep fried date in pastry with a pistachio sauce, chocolate samoso, 3 types of kulfi, and chunks of spicy fried pineapple. I’m having real trouble writing about this as it’s bringing all the tastes flooding back to me. Aaargh… must go again.
Oh, by the way, lots has been happening to me lately. Lots that I want to write about here. But… so much in fact, that I have no time for writing. Maybe one day.
Had another wonderful weekend of cooking, largely courtesy of Madhur Jaffray’s World Vegetarian. Each weekend I find myself drawn further and further into cooking, learning from my favourite texts, gradually adding dashes of my own experimentation. Madhur’s book is my current favourite, an unrivalled combination of simplicity with originality. When I cook a new dish I rarely know what to expect, but am almost always pleasantly surprised, overwhelmed even. Two or three vegetables which I have always avoided in the past, combined with the merest hint of spice, perhaps a touch of sugar, three drips of water, suddenly combine to produce unimagined flavours.
The weekend’s culinary climax was on Sunday when, after lunch of Persian egg pie (which in fact transpired to be a delicious thick herb omlette), I spent the afternoon on a variety of Sri Lankan dishes. Sublime flavours, thick spice mixtures buoyed up by cinammon, cardamom and curry leaves, marinaded in coconut milk to give a flavour somewhere between Indian and Thai. Two curries – cashew nut and aubergine – padded out with some gorgously flavoured yellow rice. Luckily I had the foresight to make far too much, and took a 3-layer tiffin carrier down to London and into work with me today. Two days of yum.
I have two other food bibles that keep me going at weekends. The Vegetarian Bistro by Marlena Spieler is a codex of comfort food – lush (if rather complex) French vegetable recipies, each containing several orders of magnitude more butter and cream than is strictly neccesary, perfect for winter entertaining when I feel like serving several bottles of heavy red wine followed by brandy, cigars and collapse/gout. (Incidentally, speaking of French vegetarian food I love the Amazon description for this book “Someone has been butchering people and animals in the West Texas mountains, a senator’s son is missing, and ex-Lieutenant Thomas Mullin, searching for the missing boy, meets events beyond his wildest nightmares” – sounds kinda exciting for a Vegetarian cookbook, although I’m not sure about the butchering people and animals. As long as I don’t have to cook them.)
How to Eat by Nigella Lawson really is as good as everyone says it is. Although not a vegetarian text, there is more than enough inside to make me happy, and when I don’t need a recipe I can just snuggle down and read it for pleasure. Nigella teaches me everything that I should probably have paid more attention to my mum over when I was young. After years of fumbling with disintegrating pastry pieces, Nigella whispers chummily that freezing is the secret, and my pies suddenly have renewed vigour. Funny, I read in the times this morning about Nigella’s husband, John Diamond’s, death, and had wierdly mixed feelings. Y’see, I used to read her opinion pieces in the Evening Standard some 10 years ago and go rather swoony over both the photo at the top of the page and the down-to-earth in-contrast-to-every-other-bloody-newspaper-opinion-columnist opinions. And I felt a bit… sad when she got married. So… nah, ferget about it.
Been a long time without posting – too long. So what’s new? Saw the head doctor last Tuesday. She wasn’t able to tell me anything I didn’t already know, but then as I already know everything, no-one ever is (actually, it’s not quite true that I know everything – that’s just a rounding-up error). Had a lovely chat though, she told me a great book to buy, and I left feeling very happy.
So why is it that life since then has been… well, not bad in any way, just more… mediocre than it was until last week. I guess just the natural tail-off. As I said to guyd2 this morning:
As far as myself goes, I’m not quite so hyperactively manic as I have been
of late. Kinda reached normal activity levels again, but trying to hold onto
a bit of learning from my recent good behaviour (yeah well, OK so it hasn’t
all been good behaviour, but you get my drift). I went to Yoga last week for
the first time ever – intend to keep it up on a weekly basis, as much as I
can manage (they run a session in one of the meeting rooms at Burnett’s
every Tuesday evening) – and tonight I’m hoping to go for a Kung Fu lession,
again my first. Strange, I hate physical stuff normally, but am getting more
and more into “sports” of all types. I was even considering a parachute jump
the other day (something I have always been more terrified of than you can
imagine), and yesterday when I saw a sign in town for helicopter lessons, I
was extremely tempted.
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