Credo / Mark Oliver

Jacob Holdt

The other week I wandered into the Photographer's Gallery, just off Charing Cross Road in London, and was wowed by the photographs of Danish photographer Jacob Holdt, who is on the shortlist for the Deutsche Borse prize.

Holdt travelled in the US in the 1970s taking photographs of the country's underclass and the super rich. I love the one of the Shell sign so much I may try and investigate how easy it is to buy a print of it.

Holdt has a huge website which seems to have hundreds, if not thousands, of his photographs. According to my sources at Wikipedia, Holdt stayed at somehting like 400 homes and his images of poor Americans were so powerful the Russians wanted to sue them as anti-US propaganda.

Heat

I sometimes get a bit obsessive about things. But not quite to the same scale as writer Bill Buford who wrote a book last year about his time as a line-cook in a top Italian restaurant. Buford was quite a serious amateur cook who wanted to know much more about food and the mysterious, intimidating realm of award-winning restaurants and celebrity chefs like his friend Mario Batali, whom he joins as a 'kitchen slave'.

He stays for months and months, much longer than he agreed with his wife, who clearly feels he has become unhinged.

The book crystallises something of the essence of aspirational, foodie middle class culture. I have really enjoyed cooking lately and read this in a kind of cheerleading way, rooting for Buford to descend deeper and deeper into his (at times, personal) hell's kitchen (the section where he is on the grill would make any reader sweat in sympathy).

What I most liked was learning little things about food. He talks about how Batali's restaurant Babbo - which I would quite like to go to one day on a Heat pilgrimage - serves food with quite a strong citrus flavour. I really like this kind of food - I like risottos with lemon zest (Lanterna, a restaurant in Scarborough do this amazing orange zest risotto), I like capers and lime and horseradish.

In Heat I learned about how cooking pasta in a vat all night created this incredible starchy water. I learnt about how Italian cooking today has its roots in the medieval kitchens of nobles like the Medicis; how sauce served with pasta is a condiment, a secondary element. I learnt about how chefs cook with pinches of this and that and don't really weigh stuff out.

Another favourite section is when Buford is talking to Marco Pierre White about eggs and the chef says "Whoa ... an egg is very important". You fry an egg by keeping the butter in the pan not to hot, not allowing it to froth and you keep touching it, finally you put some butter on the yolk.

I also bought Buford's thesis about how much of the modern world has lost touch with the cooking from generations past when recipes were past down and communities cooked dishes reliant solely on local produce.

There is a very funny scene when Buford - who also travels to Italy to learn more about the craft of preparing food, following in Batali's footsteps, the culinary tour he did before opening a restaurant - is in this Italian town where the local butcher basically abuses a restaurateur for serving dishes that have produce from outside the immediate locale.

I love the idea of travelling around and learning about foods from different parts of the world. The chef character in the Corrections gets to do that - I love that section of that book. I really can't cook very well at all yet and am clueless about the simplest things. But I bought my first kitchen apron last month and I have a growing library of cookbooks. Perhaps I see myself in my middle years on vegetarian cooking holidays in Tuscany, telling people how much I like citrus flavours. It will be very rock and roll.

Photo: Suttonhoo

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

This novel has a quiet power and I found myself tearing through it and quite bereft when I had reached the end of its 184 pages. It's about a young Pakistani man who leaves Princeton at the top of his class and gets a dream job at a top finance company which evaluates the value of other firms.

The core of the novel isthe tension betwee his Eastern, Islamic identity and his life on the edges of US high society - exemplified by his relationship with a rich, beautiful American woman.

I often like books in which the narrator is a character telling a story. (For example, I love the start of Conrad's Heart of Darkness where Marlow says "And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth."

Mohsin Hamid's book, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize, starts:    

Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America. I noticed that you were looking for something; more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both a native of this city and a speaker of your language, I thought I might offer you my services.

The narrator is the main character later in life, living in Pakistan, clearly more devout than the younger self who he describes to a mysterious American visitor.

'A conductor of invisible orchestras'

Wandering around London's Tate Modern this week on a week off from work, I was really struck by a video installation by the Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwand and filmmaker Cao Guimaraes entitled Ash Wednesday/Epilogue. Basically it shows close-ups of ants picking up sugar-coated confetti which has been thrown on the forest floor. Ash Wednesday is apparently the day after Brazil's main Carnival parties.

I quite often wander into a video installation room and am back out again in seconds but this was really arresting and I sat and watched the whole thing. I just found a piece about the artist on Frieze.com which describes the 2006 film as an "absurd, mesmerizing, faintly magical depiction of epic achievement in miniature". The article goes on:   

Work and artistic creation become interchangeable with celebration: the title alludes to carnival, and the sprightly soundtrack is a samba played with matchsticks on a table-top. The video opens with a single ant dragging a piece of gold confetti, then another ant with a blue one. We then see two struggling to get a grip on some confetti and another pair squabbling over their find. More and more ants, and bright circles, become visible, some pieces of confetti disperse on the ground and others are waved like flags as they are toted from place to place. The ants perform amazing feats – racing up steep cliffs while lugging confetti ten times their size. Eventually we see the insects’ destination – a crevice in the earth – and colourful disks disappearing into its shadows before a fade to black.

There is also an article in the Washington Post about the film and Neuenschwand explains that she used a "salami flavor -- and honey mixed with water" to attarct the ants. She goes on:

"There's a very important reference in literature here, in the book "Macunaíma" by Mário de Andrade, to leaf-cutter ants. One of his sentences is, "Lots of leaf-cutter ants, and little health, are the evils of Brazil." It’s a very famous quote in Brazilian culture.

In the United States or Europe, I think confetti is used for other events, too, but here it's mainly for Carnival. There's a sense that you have something colorful and playful like confetti, but in contraposition you have those ants working hard. The ants are kind of carrying the leftovers of a celebration. There's Carnival, and then afterward, the melancholic aspect of the last day of Carnival -- it's the sort of contradictory feelings that we have here in Brazil."

Less intellectually, it also made me think that it would be a great Sony Bravio advert. Watching it, you can almost imagine Jose Gonzalez singing.

The Road

'All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain'.

The pages fly by, the story gets under your skin. Something bad will happen - though not as bad, probably, as what has already happened: an indistinct apocalypse (possibly with a climate change dynamic) which seems to have destroyed vegetation. The survivors in US author Cormac McCarthy's haunting novel scrabble around a ruined landscape, desperately trying to find food and some splint of hope, and avoid others who have resorted to cannibalism (Mini spoiler! the scene where they have a near miss of being captured and put in a basement prison by a gang is devastating)

The two main characters, a father and son, make their way to the coast in hope of finding a community they can trust and avoid the murderous road agents. I was moved by the elemental emotional power of the book and the world the writer creates. In a way, the father and son alone seem to be the last holders of society, of human empathy (though even theirs has limits - the boy's ambition to help another little boy is blocked because of the argument that to give too much help puts them at risk). The pair refuse to cross a line that would turn them into beasts.

It is very powerful about the relationship between a parent and a child. The love they have for one another is a consolation (and a burden - at one stage the father is upset because he does not have enough bullets left to kill them both relatively easily).

McCarthy gave an interview to Oprah Winfrey in which he, slightly embarrassed, agrees it is a "love letter" to his son. The book starts: 'When he woke in the woods in the dark and cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping. Nights beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before'.

In the interview, he also talks about how he endured extreme poverty during periods of being a writer. Now this may be of the controversial autobiographical school of writing but the obvious thing is to think that this informs the book (which my friend Danny recommended to me). There is a desperation and hardship in that may have even made Dostoyevsky wince.

As one of the much mocked band of people that frets about peak oil, the novel chimed with those kinds of anxieties. I was also interested in how the pair hear superstitious tales - this rings really true for me - how if such a terrible thing happened to the world, a dynamic of religion would come into place: there would be new jostlings for power in the form of superstitions, new religions, created on the hoof.

Institut du Monde Arabe

Institut du Monde Arabe 
  Originally uploaded by miguel valle de figueiredo

This is a wonderful building, which has a very powerful atmosphere inside it. I visted just before Christmas, partly because it was arguably the most striking suggestion in the trendy little Paris Wallpaper guide (there were also lots of Le Corbusier buildings). I was kind of happy with my picture of it and then I came across this one above on flickr and realised mine was a bit rubbish. Still I guess that is how you can learn - go somewhere and take pics and then look at better photographers' efforts on flickr and see how you could have shot it.

As Miguel says: "Tthe windows are like automatic diaphragms in a  photographic lens : they open up or close down depending on the light intensity."

 
 

Andy Beckett

Over the years I've always enjoyed the work of feature writer Andy Beckett. Take this piece he wrote for the Guardian's news pages last October on the decline of North Sea oil, which crackles with atmosphere. It starts: "Before visiting a North Sea oil rig it is necessary to become a little more fatalistic."

Beckett then gets into the matter of fact safety information the crews must go through and the suits they wear which are nicknamed "body bags". I think he is great at going somewhere and tapping into something's sensibility. In this article, it is the loneliness and rubbing along of oil crews and the spectre over them of the oil running out. The piece was illustrated with an image of dark seas.

He also wrote a rather legendary piece about Paul Dacre and the Daily Mail in 2001, which includes the quote: "These people couldn't bring up a fucking hamster!"

Night driving / Under Milk Wood

This is my favourite advert of the last year and kind of makes me want to listen to the whole of Richard Burton's reading of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. There is a longer version of the advert on the car maker's site, and you can edit your own version (check out the Michael Jackson like moonwalker). It is all very Michael Mann.  The music is also wonderful - it is from Cliff Martinez's soundtrack for Solaris.

This is from a long extract of From Under Milkwood:

And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood.  The boys are dreaming wicked of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wet-nosed yard; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing.

Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.

Battle at Garmsir

  Volleyball under the stars 
  Originally uploaded by Jim Birt

The Guardian's Audrey Gillan has written a powerful, moving piece about an ambush by Taliban troops against a small patrol of British troops in Afghanistan last year that left possibly dozens of Taliban dead and two British fatalities. "I imagined the structure of the article like a film, starting with this big last supper they have before their tour ends" Gillan said.

Guardian.co.uk also produced this interactive graphic and video feature of the troops describing what happened.

I just found some good images on flickr of British troops in Afghanistan on flick by photographer  Jim Birt, including this one of troops at base. I think this must be his professional page.

Brockwell Park, south London