archive for September 08
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Matt and I were perched up in the slips watching La Calisto at the Royal Opera House last night. La Calisto is Francesco Cavalli’s 1651 baroque opera telling the story of Callisto, one of the many nymphs who fell prey to Jupiter’s lust. She’s a chaste follower of Diana, “the empress of all the virgins” I think the opera calls the goddess at one point, but Jupiter cleverly disguises himself as Diana and has hot woman on woman sex with her. The goddess turns Callisto into a bear, and she’s nearly killed by her own son by Jupiter, who averts disaster by turning them both into constellations in the sky.
It’s a great camp comedy opera, a bit like Orpheus in the Underworld, with a quiet baroque sound from the orchestra, which is all harpsichords and lutes, and lots of dancing as well as singing, and completely insane sets and costumes, including people dressed in outlandish chameleon, pegasus and horse costumes, and a rather revolting Pan character with a willy hanging out of his furry legs.
Great fun, lots of lewdness, and with a surprisingly quiet, beautiful and moving ending.
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Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
Well, the tumultuous financial sector news has been pretty riveting, the glimmer of hope being that Gordon Brown has actually been tempted to bring the excesses of finance under the control of the state. Could this be possible? A return to sane Keynesian economic policies?
Everyone should read the excellent Green New Deal report. It both rams home the terrifying realities of climate change and the credit crisis, but also provides a readable, bold and inspiring set of solutions, drawing on the historical parallels of the US New Deal in the wake of the Great Depression and the way the UK mobilised to cut consumption and drive innovation in the face of World War II.
The report is basically a blueprint for promoting economic recovery, avoiding the worst impacts of peak oil and cutting climate-changing emissions.
Climate change. The trigger for potentially irreversible, runaway effects is just around the corner, as little as 98 months away and counting. It’s not long, but still enough time to sort it out!
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Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
We popped round to see Charles and Miranda for dinner last night, to drop off Charles’s wellies and chair, and to sample his homemade beer (“Old Horrible”) and ginger beer. The beer was heavy on the barley, so hard going, but good! We mixed it with the ginger beer to make shandies.
We also played Ticket to Ride, another splendid board game from the Germans, and Charles cooked us Moroccan style dinner.
It might have been the green peppers, or perhaps the ginger beer, but Matt had a fairly crazy dream last night. I had a weirdish dream involving me rescuing lots of teachers, but his was basically about the spirits of deceased couples, known as Orvals. They float around and inhabit willing living couples from time to time so they can have sex with each other through their bodies. They manifest as sparkles of light in the air, and can coalesce around broken objects and fix them, or leave piles of gold and money. And they’re called Orvals – what a great name!
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Tuesday, September 16th, 2008
Large scale “in vitro meat production” is apparently now getting to the point where it could be feasible to produce at a cost competitive with rearing beef.
What is in vitro meat production you might ask? It’s laboratory grown meat that has never been part of a living animal, basically muscle cells grown on a grid. It’s not going to be complex steak, more like ground basic hamburger and chicken nugget meat. The idea is that it would cater for the meat-heavy appetites of a growing global middle class and reduce greenhouse gas production, 18 per cent of which is caused by livestock.
But isn’t it gross? Sometimes I feel so out of sync with the spirit of the age! What starker sign could there be that after two decades of economic liberalisation, global food production is now thoroughly under the control of corporations and banks? Its main purpose is not to feed people, but to maximise profits and drive economic growth.
Because feeding people should not be just about filling them with nutrients. Food is close to the soul, like sex, music, friendship, drinking. Sure, nothing escapes some degree of commodification in a capitalist system (sex: porn; friendship: Facebook; music: record companies; drinking: lager) but we’ve turned food production into one of the world’s dirtiest industries.
Food production to make money means cutting labour costs by turfing small scale farmers off their land and into the swelling ranks of the world’s urban slums, creating large scale monocultural farms with big machines and chemical inputs and focusing on livestock, where the biggest profits can be made. This is why we feed half the world’s wheat and 80 per cent of the world’s maize to animals. When something turns up that makes more money – biofuels – companies grow that instead of food.
Perhaps it’s the sheer scale and horror of industrial food that provides the springboard for the exuberant, almost hysterical, diversity of positive food movements around us, all striving to restore something authentic and culturally meaningful to what we eat. From Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall trying to tackle the battery chicken production line to Fairtrade, building meaningful connections between consumers and producers and putting humanity back into food, to the transition town movement, people are trying to dress food in new ethical imperatives, notions of restraint and living within limits, living lightly and mindfully upon the earth, the idea that food is more than just nutrition, making choices to lead a better and happier life.
Why grow crap meat in test tubes? A shorter route to happiness is to eat the diet that biology and ecology designed us for, to paraphrase Colin Tudge: plenty of plants, not much meat, maximum variety, everything in moderation. This way lies sustainable farms, humane animal welfare, the increased productivity of small scale farming. And the foundation of the world’s greatest cuisines: India, Italy, Turkey, Provence!
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Monday, September 15th, 2008
Brother Josh stayed last night, on his way from Kent to Devon. He has boy band style blonde streaks at the moment!
I cooked some curried purple cauliflower florets, amazing looking stuff, and potatoes with ginger, and we sat and watched Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, a Jacques Demy film in the same musical vein as Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. Not as good as Cherbourg and a little too long, but good fun anyway, strangely also starring Gene Kelly, who does tap dancing, white teeth and looking exceptionally wistful, as only he can.
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Saturday, September 13th, 2008
We all piled into Geli’s grandfather’s lovely house and gardens yesterday for Josh and Geli’s nuptials. It was glorious! Lots of lovely booze and food, lots of parents and grandparents to chat to.
Kal made a classic best man’s speech, with various famous tales of Old Man Horn, or Old Man Husband as Andy dubbed him late last night. Josh made a very charming speech too.
Josh found a great Cuban band for the dancing, which we tried to do all Latino style and sexy like, and the Essex boys also came on for a session. Abbie and I got a bit carried away during Roadhouse Blues and after pogoing around, we both crashed into the stage, knocking over music stands and getting in the way of Jamie D and Josh who carried on performing like the professionals they are!
Later on there was swinging on a rope swing across the brook in the garden. Jamie S lost a shoe in there, a noble if less horrendously dangerous follow up to the River Tay incident at Mary’s wedding. He searched downstream for the shoe, couldn’t find it anywhere, so decided in the end to drop the other shoe in and see if it drifted to the same place as its partner, to lead him to it. It whizzed off downstream into the night and he never saw either shoe again. Ah well!
Later on, we all headed back to Kal and Jim’s place, listened to the Beatles, me and Jamie had a gaffer tape battle with Steve, and then we wrapped Andy up in gaffer tape for the rest of the night. Why not?
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Monday, September 1st, 2008
This morning there was a lovely quiet restless crispness in the air, as I walked along Leighton Road on the way to work. The sunshine saturating the crisp cold of early morning felt warmer than many recent days, but you could feel that we’ve taken the first step into a fresh new season. The deepening contours of Autumn are refreshing after the weary shallows of damp summer rain.
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