As reported by the BBC, etc.
Belgian city plans 'veggie' days
The Belgian city of Ghent is about to become the first in the world to go vegetarian at least once a week.Starting this week there will be a regular weekly meatless day, in which civil servants and elected councillors will opt for vegetarian meals.
Ghent means to recognise the impact of livestock on the environment.
The UN says livestock is responsible for nearly one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, hence Ghent's declaration of a weekly "veggie day".
Public officials and politicians will be the first to give up meat for a day.
I've never been to Ghent. I'm definitely going to go now, and I guess I'd better make it a long weekend so I can be there on a Thursday. And I guess it'll be easy to find something vegetarian to eat when I'm there. The Guardian reports:
Every restaurant in the city is to guarantee a vegetarian dish on the menu, with some going fully vegetarian every Thursday. From September, the city's schools are to make a meat-free meal the "default" option every Thursday, although parents can insist on meat for their children. At least one hospital wants to join in.
The Guardian have produced an 'ethical fashion directory'. It's a little tricksy - click on titles and random new windows open, and you have to click on an image to view different sorts of clothes (which opens new windows in the background, not always obvious), but it's still useful: Ethical fashion directory.
Over the past few years I've frequently heard people say "Well I'd love to buy more ethical fashion, but I've no idea where to start ..." Here is our solution. Our directory will provide, I hope, a means of navigating the sometimes confusing world of ethical fashion and make it easy for you, the consumer, to find exactly what you are looking for.
I think the stories behind how those people ended up in that place at the time they did is part of the reason I like these so much. You also learn what they made of it, and how it's changed their perspective on their own lives and homes. Travel as contemplation is so much more interesting than travel as spectacle.
The New York Times: Why We Travel
A quick recommendation for the Fledgling Theatre's charming production of 'Wolves at the window' at the Arcola - excellent performances and writing, and some lovely stage work. Go see it if you're in London.
I was so annoyed and bemused by something I read in today's Urban Junkies London newsletter that I wrote to them.
I am really curious about today's mailout, which says "Boris has temporarily come to the rescue. His launch of "Lates "" - but UJ have been promoting Lates at various venues for months, so you must know that the Lates initiative was already up and running when Ken was mayor.I'm really disappointed - I know spin is everything and the truth means little in politics these days but I didn't expect to see it in Urban Junkies.
It's hugely ironic because Boris is probably going to have a huge negative impact on the arts in London. How dare his office try to claim an existing and well-established program started by the previous mayor as "Boris' Lates"?
I'll take everything I read in Urban Junkies with a pinch of salt now. I already did, to an extent, because their editorial direction was so clearly influenced by their advertisers, but at least it was obvious - when there was a huge ad banner followed by a big push in the text, you knew how to read between the lines. And Urban Junkies ran Lates ad campaigns before Boris was mayor, so I don't see how they could claim ignorance of the prior existence of the Lates program.
If you didn't get a chance to watch them in a venue (we watched them at the Barbican in London as part of the Australian Film Festival) you can check the Tropfest 2008 entries out outline.
I liked Marry Me, Made in Australia, Beggar's Belief because it was set down the road from my old place, White Lines and the shark and mouse ones.
I randomly came across 'Fictional Cities' while looking for something else.
We all have our favourite places and favourite stories about them. Our idea of these places is usually a mix of experience and imagination, and fiction is usually no small contributor to our mental maps.I love London, Venice and Florence, so I made this site, with lists and reviews of all sorts of fiction set in these three cities.
I randomly came across artslice, a "place to learn a new "art word" or artist a day. There will be fun facts to know and tell taken from the pages of art history as well as current working artists". Cool!
I meant to write about this exhibition, having seen it in Tokyo recently, but I haven't had a chance. So in the meantime here's 'we make money not art' on Japanese-ness in Japanese Contemporary Art: 'Roppongi Crossing: Future Beats in Japanese Contemporary Culture'.
I got mail (actual physical mail) from the "Domain Registry of America" ( this week, telling me that some of my domains were due for renewal.
Which would be great, except I don't actually use them for my domains and their 'renewal' form is actually a 'switch to us' form. The language is all carefully written so it's legal, but to the casual reader it's just a 'domain name expiration notice'. I think it's just this side of a scam that takes advantage of people's general confusion about technical stuff.
Also on my grump list is phpwebhosting.com, who haven't responded to helpdesk calls for well over a week - so I haven't had email in *ages*. I'm going to switch hosts this week, I'm just waiting on confirmation of ssh access.
If you're in London, go see Uncle Semolina (& Friends)'s production of Gilgamesh at the Barbican's Pit theatre. But hurry, because it's only on until October 13.
From the Times Travel site, 100 best travel websites including Best for holiday bargains (cheap flights, insurance, etc) or Top-value rooms; Road, rail, ferry, cruise (including the fabulous www.transportdirect.info, seat61 (how to get anywhere by rail), deutsche bahn (train timetables across Europe)); Specialist travel ("Cook, dance, trek, surf, paint, go single or go green - these sites will guide and inspire, plus there's some great tips for travellers embarking on a gap year adventure") and Travel 2.0 (news and tips from other travellers, but see also Inside info).
I would review the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival shorts 'Trouble and Strife' but owing to a mix-up with daylight savings (i.e. I forgot) I missed the session. I had a lovely time catching up with people in the new back cafe at the NFT so I can't really complain.
I really, really recommend this film. It's set in Tel Aviv (and made me want to visit, except that the politics make it kinda complicated), and is basically a love story between an Israeli and a Palestinian guy. That's not all it is, obviously because of the religious, historical and political issues, but also because it's firmly grounded in the everyday lives of a group of friends who are figuring out who and what they want to be while enjoying the best and coolest life Tel Aviv has to offer. The 'bubble' refers to life in Tel Aviv compared to the rest of Israel, but I think it could also refer to that stage of life where you and everyone you know are young and beautiful and life is relatively uncomplicated.
To me, the depictions of Israeli/Palestinian relations seemed fair, but really I can't judge. It certainly gave me a more concrete understanding of what life might have been like for those 'mad Israeli kids' you meet backpacking when they've finished their military service, and the Palestinian issues with checkpoints were well portrayed.
(And the chick who plays Lulu is hot.)
Another LLGFF review:
Puccini for Beginners was quite slick, well played, well written and very New York but overall it was strangely unsatisfying. It might just be that I expect more radical content or film-making from festival films, because if I was to see it at my local cinema it would be a lovely date movie. On the other hand maybe I'm spoilt because for the people I know there's not much that's shocking about a lesbian falling for a man.
It's still nice to see a positive representation of queer life on the screen, and I particularly liked the scenes where passing characters broke out of role to engage with the main character's internal dialogue.
It felt weirdly transgressive watching heterosexual sex in a cinema full of queer at a Lesbian and Gay film festival.
After a week of sunshine it's back to being cold again and it snowed a bit on Monday and Tuesday. We've solved the problem of the lack of heating in the office with a new program of spontaneous Aboriginal Morris dancing.
Ok, quick film review. I'm trying out the hreview microformat at the same time.
Itty Bitty Titty Committee opened the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival last night. It was an entertaining start to the festival - cute cast, good production values and cinematography, great soundtrack. There was an occasional clunky "here's the politics" but it wasn't so bad that it pulled you out of the experience. It's definitely not a coming out film and I really enjoyed the way being a lesbian was normalised - it wasn't an issue in scenes set in a family or work environment.
A quick catch-up on things around London:
A few Sundays ago I went on a trek to see Jake and Dinos Chapman's Two Legs Good, Four Legs Bad at
Paradise Row. Last Sunday I wandered around Shoreditch looking for open galleries. Not much luck at first, except scaffolding pillars outside the Foundary were decorated in different styles, no idea who by.
The final gallery was Flowers East, where I really liked 'The Person Who.......' by Jiro Osuga - mostly paintings but there was a room with a table of toys and small paintings that folded out to show a different side.
I also saw Tim Berners-Lee speak (leave a comment or email me for my notes) on Tuesday, and saw Orfeo at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, both of which were really rather fabulous.
Very short review: last night I saw Kneehigh Theatre's excellent production of Cymbeline and enjoyed myself to much I'd go see anything else they did without bothering with published reviews.
Two blogs I have been enjoying lately are design dyke and boicozine. The Antimix Podcasts at boicozine are particularly excellent.
And... breathe.
Work is busy, busy, busy. My brain is slowly collapsing in on itself.
Otoh, I saw Tangram Theatre' s brilliant production of 4:48 Psychosis at the Arcola last night and had a lovely dinner then drinks at the Dalston Jazz Cafe.
My brother has been in London for a week now, and so far it's all going well. We've had a few wobbles but that's only to be expected, and generally we've handled them with maturity and consideration, which is just lovely.
It's ages since I've reviewed anything I've seen, so to start on the backlog... last night I saw The Royal Hunt of the Sun at the National.
I really liked the play itself, but the staging was weird. I don't know if it was deliberate, but it was as if the past forty years had never happened. It might have been intentionally retro, which is why I'd love to hear what they intended.
The staging, particularly in the first part, just seemed amateurish. It really distracted from the performances and the text. Where modern productions might use projections to suggest scenery or movement, they used swathes of silk, which could have been effective, but somehow just wasn't. Some of the costumes were gorgeous, but some looked like something your Mum might run up the day before fancy dress day at primary school.
There was far too much action that looked like bad mime or interpretative dance, and the Incas' accents were almost offensively 'Meester, I breeeng you girls, yes?'.
It got better in the second part, but lots of people didn't come back after the interval.
But some of the audience obviously loved it, judging by the applause at the end. The crowd was older than other audiences I've seen at the National, particularly for Travelex season shows.
Two fun links: the Lonely Planet cities game and the V&A 'Create your own modernist poster' site.
I went to see Waiting for Godot at the Barbican last night. It was an excellent performance and I'd recommend it if you're in London.
Johnny Murphy was perfectly physically embodied as Estragon. Barry McGovern as Vladimir was more 'actorly' though I think he had the more difficult role as he had to express a greater awareness of the external world and eventually of the futility of their wait. It's difficult to know what to say about the staging and lighting because I think Beckett left quite detailed instructions, but they were simple and effective.
In a weird way, the whole thing made me very glad I'm not a teenager anymore. I was such an angst-ridden nihilist, struggling with an existentialist crisis, and plays like this didn't help. I guess the external validation was good, but it's nice not to care so much anymore.
And speaking of The Proposition, the Guardian travel section had a good interview with the director, John Hillcoat.
I think the final paragraph says most of what you need to know about Australia:
"Flight time: London-Brisbane 22½ hrs inc stopover.
Train/coach time: Brisbane-Winton 27hrs."
Last night I read Kinky Friedman's Blast From The Past. It's always a joy reading Kinky.
While I'm in review mode, last week I read Playing the Moldovans at Tennis by Tony Hawks, who it turns out wrote the Beastie Boys parody, Stutter Rap (No Sleep 'Til Bedtime). It was a good light read, and now I'll know to carry a torch when trying to negotiate the streets of Moldova after dark.
I saw The Proposition tonight. It was a lot gorier than films I'd normally see but overall I liked it. I don't know if it was the cinematography or the impact of the countryside itself but I was almost surprised to remember that I'd see Islington, not the outback, when I left the cinema.
The English garden and fine china were almost over-played but I think it's impossible to really express how alien the country must have seemed to people who've grown up with it. I used to be irritated by the way European settlers named towns and features after places back in Europe, but now I see it as an act of hope and desperation, as if they hoped they could tame and make green a wild brown country by naming it for a settled verdant one.
The flies almost deserved a credit line. I think it's the first film I've seen that captured the small but unignorable, inexorable presence of flies in such visceral detail.
David Wenham reminded me of Richard Roxburgh as the Duke of Worcester in Moulin Rouge!, which was a bit unfortunate.
The script was less about the proposition itself than the past and future choices faced by Charlie, the outlaw, and Stanley, the British trooper. It was a lot more subtle than the plot outline suggests but it was written by Nick Cave, so that shouldn't be a surprise. Each character has moral choices, and the results can be hard to bear. My description doesn't really do it justice, so go see it for yourself.
I read The Shadow of the Wind recently, and really enjoyed it. At times it almost veered into 'holiday reading' tweeness, but it was saved by some close observation and the author's fresh turn of phrase.
Anyway, I found myself noting passages I liked, and here are some of them*:
"One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. By the time the mind is able to comprehend what has happened, the wounds of the heart are already too deep."
"I realised how easily you can lose all animosity towards someone you've deemed your enemy as soon as that person stops behaving as such."
There was a beautiful pun where characters were discussing the Catholic Church and the mysterious Fermin said, "let's not mention the missal industry".
And finally, "a story is a letter the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discuss otherwise."
* Of course, one person's interesting snippet is another person's trite crap.
Some quick book reviews...
Paul Theroux's "The Happy Isles of Oceania". While a nice break from grey London skies, Theroux has an irritating habit of following a fresh, perceptive comment with an vexatiously inane comment. Amazingly, this travel book didn't make me want to pack my bags and visit the countries he has. It did, otoh, make me want to start canoeing or sea kayaking again.
I've also recently read Ann Bannon's "Odd Girl Out", and "I Am a Woman", partly because I love pulp fiction and I guess partly because it puts modern lesbian life into perspective.
Ann Bannon's website includes the introduction to "Odd Girl Out", which includes the fabulous phrase, "She found herself climbing down a ladder of flesh into a cesspool of Lesbian depravity". Not so fabulous if that was the only depiction of lesbians available to society, but I wouldn't mind climbing down that ladder now.