Spring wine To Holland Park last night for the spring wine tasting at Anne Tupker’s Bouquet Wines. I seem to be relaxing my rule about not educating my taste for wine (good grief, it’ll want an allowance next) and found indecipherable scrawls all over the sheet I was given for making notes. A good party as always, with much help from Cole Porter.
Barefoot ballet To Sadler’s Wells yesterday afternoon with Miki to watch Sylvie Guillem and the Ballet Boyz barefoot in three pieces by Russell Maliphant. This is the most inspiring dance I have ever seen; how I would dance if I could. The dance language seems to have been borrowed from capoeira (Torsion), hip-hop (Two) and the circus (Broken Fall). Might still be tickets left. Guillem also has the best personal website I've seen for a performing artist.
Afterwards Miki introduced me to the Candid Café in Islington, of which I should have known years ago. This place reminds me of bohemian Sydney café haunts like Badde Manors in Glebe.
Spammers have hit on a new way to sneak past my Bayesian spam filter — loading their messages with quotable wit. For this quote-monkey, that might just work.
More food Old friends Stephen Brady & Susanne Capano and new friends Geoff & Beverley Blanning last night. Once again, I meant to prepare some of the food and didn’t. Discovery: Miki’s cheesecake and Noe Pedro Ximinéz muy viejo sherry. (Turns out I was the last to find out.)
Sculpture, flamenco, sherry To Southwark last night for the awards ceremony of the Jerwood Sculpture Prize. Miki took pix, while I left too early to hear that the prize had been awarded to someone not Yoko. A fast walk over to the Royal Festival Hall to meet Nick Sowicz, Esmerelda Sanz and Handan Erek for the farewell performance of Cuban pianist Bebo Valdes and flamenco singer El Cigala. Blending flamenco and Cuban jazz — who’d have thought? And now it’s gone. Life flashes past. Saluted this time with manzanilla and madeira afterwards at Gordon’s Wine Bar on the Embankment.
Feeding time We started asking people over for dinner again. Neighbours Tom & Gillian Brent round last night with Anne Tupker and David Craik.
Spanish lesson The humanities have much to teach us about technology, according to this story contributed by Susan Ormrod in Perth, Australia.
A Spanish teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine. House for instance, is feminine: la casa. Pencil, however, is masculine: el lapiz. A student asked, What gender is computer?
Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether computer should be a masculine or a feminine noun. Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation.
The men’s group decided that computer should definitely be of the feminine gender (la computer), because:
The women’s group, however, concluded that computers should be masculine (el computer), because:
A dose of humility An Op/Ed piece on Iraq in yesterday’s Baltimore Sun by General Wesley Clark.
Dangerous visions If you’re wondering what happened to the America we knew, you can find a lot of answers in the TV science-fiction series Firefly.
Much SF is thinly-disguised westerns set in space, John F. Kennedy’s “high frontier”. Firefly drops the disguise, setting most of its action on lightly-settled “border planets” where dress and manners evoke the Wild West of the Reconstruction. It’s cowboys plus spaceships.
American Civil War references play a large part. The central character, Mal Reynolds, is a former sergeant in the Independent army recently defeated by the victorious Alliance. His striped cavalry breeches are still held up by suspenders, and his right leg has an antique Navy Colt sidearm strapped to it.
Embattled and embittered, he’s The Outlaw Josey Wales reincarnated; addicted to understatement, and trained in the Clint Eastwood school of haiku. Space cowboys, it turns out, whistle Dixie.
Reynolds and his crew dodge the law, doing the best they can in a world that allows them neither peace nor place. The Anglo-Sino Alliance that hounds them represents the fusion of Earth’s two superpowers. Alliance officials act like the Feds and dress in a futuristic pastiche of Eastern European military style. The theme song has it all:
Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don’t care, I’m still free
You can’t take the sky from me.
Science fiction is never about the future, of course, nor would it be interesting if it were. Fantasy offers the present a distorting mirror in which we see ourselves as Lilliputians, Yahoos, hobbits or Winston Smith.
It’s only a TV series, of course, and a cancelled one at that; a harmless confection whipped up by the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Thanks to Ray Cannon for recommending it.) But the life of man is lived largely in the imagination. We live in a web of stories which we dub Reality. Talking recently to movie producer Martha Chang in LA, I heard that Hollywood is obsessed with finding ‘Red State’ movies. Firefly is made for this.
Joss Whedon’s Firefly offers a vision acutely attuned to the dominant mood in America: beaten but defiant, resentful and suspicious of any kind of authority. It is a dangerous vision for the most powerful state on the planet. The poor are always with us, and so are the Hitlers, awaiting their opportunity to scare us into murder and oppression.
See also
» SUVs and turkey friers 22 Jan 2005
» War on anxiety 17 Feb 2005
» Mark Fiore’s Minister of Fear
Editing By slow train yesterday to Bristol and the home of Anthony & Sylvia Camacho for a meeting of the Vector Working Group. We are woefully behind our VECTOR publication schedule and will recover by issuing 21.2 and 21.3 in quick order, with the Ken Iverson commemorative issue held back until 21.4. A rare treat listening to Anthony's Quad stereo with huge electrostatic speakers, ancient and still perfect.
Back in Hampstead today with new VWG member Tomas Gustafsson from Helsinki, installing a pilot phpBB forum at Vector Online.
Sculpture
I had not realised what social events art shows are nowadays. The place was packed with faces with raised eyebrows, excited grins and wine or beer glasses: it was a challenge to work my way round the exhibits. I thought I detected a correlation between the entries and the entrants’ notes on them. Some pieces spoke to me directly; their makers had noted sources of inspiration. Other pieces seemed somewhat contrived (but don’t listen to me, I’ve never been a fan of conceptual art as a category) and their makers had thought it best to be helpful in noting all the associations that might be teased out of the work.
Pizza Afterwards with Ruth Eisenhart to meet other friends of the late Nicholas Battye at a restaurant he frequented opposite the British Library. Had he been with us, we would have been celebrating his 55th birthday.
Nick’s books Good news about his library and papers. They are to go to Canonbury Tower, where they will be available in a dedicated reading room, courtesy of the Marquess of Northampton. Lord Northampton hopes one day to offer at Canonbury Academy an MA course in mysticism and esoteric studies; Nick’s library would then be the nucleus of the academy’s collection. In the meantime, the Canonbury Masonic Research Centre offers lectures and an annual conference.