It’s like being in a David Lynch or Coen brothers movie.
My motel room (Culver City Travelodge) is just like the stakeout motel rooms of crime thrillers, with its own front door off a common balcony. It’s got several ‘room dividers’ for you to hold your breath behind, trying to avoid the immanent shootout.
The television is the size of a dining table. (I read on a bus shelter advertisement that Americans watch an average of 13 years of TV in their life.)
I arrived into LAX after a reasonable flight from Heathrow, having taken a risk on seat 33K. Bulk head. A little extra legroom but this is where bassinettes are fitted. The screaming infant was on the other side but it still required my most zen-like ‘letting go’.
Everyone told me: you will need a car. Even after the first day I could see that this was wise advice. However, I wasn’t looking forward to driving an automatic for the first time, on the wrong side of the road, in a hire car, in one of the most traffic heavy cities on the planet, in the dark, tired from an 11-hour sleepless journey. I couldn’t believe it when I was presented with a Nitro four by four SUV, hilariously described by some online retailers as ‘compact’. It feels like I’m driving a small bus.
There is no induction. They just tell you which lot the car is in and that the keys are in the ignition. It was already completely dark by the time I got there and in the unlit carpark I was at a loss even to find the, erm, light switch. I had to keep opening and shutting the driver’s door for 20 seconds of illumination in order to try and locate the relevant controls. But after a jolty start and a kind (although rather loud) explanation from some random guy that my jerking was probably due to the fact that I had my foot on the emergency break (it’s not a clutch Joshua, this is an automatic car) I managed to follow the sat-nav to aforesaid motel.
I’m in LA for just 5 nights. The main reason is to visit The Museum of Jurassic Technology and interview the Founder Director David Wilson for a research project I am making into artist leaders. As the conundrum of its name would suggest, The Museum of Jurassic Technology is something of an anomaly. How to describe what it is? Well, from the outside it looks a bit like a, well, I’m not sure it looks like anything much other than itself. Here it is:
Located in the historic Palms district of Culver City, Los Angeles at a the busy intersection of Venice Boulevard and Main Street, this easy to miss exterior hides a tardis of expertly detailed glass fronted vitrines, holographic film projections, audio guides and scale models. The themes are diverse yet connected (the connections are themselves part of the wonder to be untangled and discovered). Memory, the history of the museum, miniaturisation, the common man, the wonder of discovery, the art of science: a particular favourite of mine was the authoritative film on the life of Hagop Sandaldjian who developed an innovative method for the ergonomics of violin fingering and was a miniaturist in extremis. The film is screened next to several of his ‘sculptures’, which include a detailed anatomically accurate figure of Napoleon in the eye of a needle. You can only view it through a microscope.
You are never entirely sure of what you are looking at. In this way The Museum of Jurassic Technology proselytises the value to be found in doubt, and asks us to question institutional authority more generally. But this is not a museum of fairytales. It is not depicting fiction. It’s more that fact is always presented, in Wilson’s own words for describing the museum itself, as more of a “grey area”.
For nearly 30 years David Wilson has been adding to the museum displays with painstaking dedication and has developed an international following. It has the same status in the museum (and art and science) worlds, as cult movies do in film. It was a pleasure and a privilege to talk with him and the fulfilment of a long time aspiration to visit his museum.
(If you are interested in finding out more about The Museum of Jurassic Technology, then get hold of a copy of Lawerence Weschler’s 1995 book Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. It is amusing and accessible. It still feels fresh and remains in print.)
Five minutes walk from The Museum of Jurassic Technology are The Culver Studios, where some of the greatest films of all time have been shot, including Citizen Kane and Gone With The Wind. Although its umpteen ‘stages’ are still used for shoots, as I walked past, it was the studio building itself that seemed to be the star of a giant film rig, with enormous camera crane.
Today, my one and only full ‘day off’, I decided to leave Los Angeles by the famous Highway 1, through to Malabu (home to half of the Hollywood A-list) and up the coast to Santa Barbara. It’s amazing that in just 45 minutes on leaving one of the most urban of all conurbations in the world, you can be in wilderness. This hurriedly taken photograph by the side of the road is unfortunately a poor representation of the scenery, which is epic. The Pacific is on one side and Los Padres National Forest on the other.
Oh, and I forgot to mention 21 degrees. Back to scarf and hat tomorrow.
For the last two weeks I have been on my annual trip to Fredrikstad in the South-East of Norway to teach at the Norwegian Theatre Academy. I’ve been doing this pretty much every year since 2007 and it’s the one piece of ‘regular’ teaching that I maintain.
Standing at the urinals in Rygge Airport, I was greeted by this chewing gum and sanitary grill chap. Fellow passengers were unimpressed as I reached for my camera.
Norway is a very long country and you are never very far from the coast. Fredrikstad is in the bottom right.
The Norwegian Theatre Academy is a small school. There are only ever two years at a time. Students study under ‘acting’ or ‘scenography’ (although there is a lot of blurring of boundaries and in many ways it is akin to an art school training in the UK). The entire group of 3rd year actors that I have been teaching comprises 7 students. Their resources are exceptional. Courses are taught in English. Modules are often delivered by a slate of international visiting artists. As there is a strictly limited series of recreational activities in this quiet city, especially in the long winter months, students work hard and form strong bonds.
During my time here, we have been thinking about ‘audience’ and students have been encouraged to explore, examine and create innovative ways of working with audiences. This has included the discussion of performance ethics and personal limits in stagecraft. Here Maja Clemensten Hansen responds to the question of whether or not she would kill an animal during a performance, a pet shop goldfish in hand. She didn’t. The fish was returned to the shop.
The students have been setting each other challenges, which they accept or refuse. Performance experiments that explore what is risked when an artist meets an audience.
I am staying in a small apartment about 2 minutes walk from the Academy. Located in the roof of a barn conversion, my temporary home is on land that was owned by Edvard Munch’s Aunt. Apparently, when he came to Fredrikstad during what turned out to be influential years, Munch stayed in the ‘ginger bread’ building just across the yard.
More immediate to my local environment, is the fact that my next-door neighbour really, really likes Coca Cola.
Given that they pay you 1 krona for every aluminium can that you return to the supermarket here, she is hoarding quite a lucrative stash. The cigarette butts might fetch less.
I know it is really puritanical to publish this photo on my blog but it is so genuinely strange to me that someone would not empty the ashtray at their own home. I find myself drawn to it as a kind of cultural oddity.
The Academy moved to a new building last year. It was purpose built. The spaces are great but I still have a soft spot for the old site in Gamlebyen, the old town of Fredrikstad, which is built on an incredible star-shaped island and is one of the oldest surviving fortified towns in Europe.
The most convenient way to get there as a pedestrian, is by ferry across the River Glomma (the longest river in Norway at 598-kilometres with a drainage basin that covers a full 13% of the country). I decided to go back for a stroll there on my day off. Twilight on the water. There was always something that gave me a kick by arriving to work by boat.
Last Saturday I took the (expensive) 1 hour 15 minute train journey to Oslo and spent the day with the former Head of Acting, Camilla Eeg-Tverbakk and her family. In the centre of town, in view of the Royal Palace, some guy was creating one of his own.
We took the tram up into the mountains to witness and partake in some sledge action.
It was good fun but freezing. Camilla and Per Gunnar’s ridiculously cute son Viktor had pronounced earlier in the winter, “I like summer”. I found myself agreeing.
Suetomi, named after the chef, is a ten seat counter restaurant (with additional private dining room for six) in a side street in Azabu, Tokyo. It would be easy to miss. A modest 30cm sign with the name and ’3F’ is all that indicates you are in the correct place. The building itself is not impressive; a grey concrete tower, which looks from the outside, like any other residential building in the area.
I had been here once before. My friend Nozomu Takase (advertising executive and man about town) had taken me here as a treat in May. Now it was my turn to treat Goh Ideta, a belated birthday present and as a thank you for hosting me on this brief trip (part business, mostly pleasure). Like so many places in Japan, without the introduction, I simply would never have known it existed.
Arriving at the restaurant is pretty much like arriving at the door of an apartment. The space inside is small but carefully decorated. You walk along a skipping stone corridor past the private dining room on the right and into the ‘main’ space: a room of about 4 meters square with an L-shaped bench of unvarnished pale wood at which you sit and behind which stands the chef. Presumably this is Kasumicho Suetomi.
There is no menu, simply a choice of prices, which you have agreed at the time of booking (well in advance). Lunch is either Y5,000 (£41.50) or Y10,000* (£83) if you sit at the counter.
The taking of photographs in such and intimate space is inappropriate (you sit next to fellow diners as close as on the Tokyo trains) but I did have a notebook to hand in which I jotted down the tastes of this nine course feast.
I would run out of superlatives too quickly, so will stick to simply describing the food.
THE FIRST
grilled Japanese potato (ebi-imo)
salt roasted gingko nuts (speared on pair of pine needles)
dried mullet roe (karasumi) in a rice paste (mochi) sandwich
decorated with a fallen red Maple leaf
Of particular interest here was the bright orange karasumi, which looks something like a dried apricot but tastes of caviar. The chewiness, sandwiched between the melting mochi worked particularly well.
THE SECOND
shredded signora mushrooms (maitake)
with mochi rice
and grated yuzu citrus peel
A little bit like a risotto but with a very clear flavour. The yuzu adds a kind of sour mandarin twist to the savoury mushroom taste.
THE THIRD
consomme with sea bream
and mild spring onion (kujo-negi)
with shredded yuzu citrus peel
Next to the sour citrus and the sharp spring onion, the fish tastes almost sweet.
THE FOURTH
sashimi of tuna
with fresh horseradish (wasabi) and soy sauce
sashimi of sea bream
with sudachi citrus and salt
perilla (shiso) sprouts
After the cooked sea bream, then you have it raw. The taste with the citrus and the salt makes this fresh cut of fish even fresher, as if it has literally just been pulled from the sea.
THE FIFTH
simmered radish (daikon)
with fried tofu (oage)
and wilted chrysanthemum leaves (kyo-kikuna)
The chrysanthemum leaves are slightly bitter and so draw out the sweetness of the stock (dashi) that the daikon has been cooked in.
THE SIXTH
grilled hilgendorf saucord (nodoguro)
with Japanese mustard (mizuna)
and shredded fried tofu (oage)
This fish sounds like a principle of chemistry. I had never heard of it. It was barbecued on a charcoal grill in front of you, so tastes slightly smokey.
THE SEVENTH
shredded champagne crab (matsubagani)
Sweet and sour. A dressing with a small amount of vinegar and some kind of citrus.
THE EIGHTH
pickled yam
pickled turnip (kabu)
cherry blossom shrimp (sakura-ebi)
with Japanese rice and Szechuan pepper (sansho)
miso soup with tofu
This is really the ‘filler’, which they leave until the end. They want you to stay a little bit hungry so that you savour the tastes for the duration of the meal.
You can have as much shrimp rice as you want. I had thirds. The rice had continued to cook on the sides of the clay pot it was served from, which meant you got more crispy bits the longer you ate.
THE NINTH
Japanese persimmon (kaki)
European pear
Fresh, cooled and perfectly ripe with a delicate perfume.
Delicious.
* Just in case you were wondering which ‘price’ has been described.
36 formal meetings
51 different people
1 radio interview
and
1 public presentation
…my work as Thinker in Residence at Performance Space has come to an end. It’s been fascinating and I shall write it all up somewhere else but it’s not really in the spirit of this blog to be preoccupied with work.
Regular readers will be aware however, of the longstanding preoccupation with things banana. Well this week I experienced a new addition to the catalogue. It’s the love child of a foam banana and a Milky Way: The banana whip Milky Way.
This Mars treat is only available in Australia and even here it is hard to find. After a chance encounter at the checkout of a convenience store, I went in a vain search for another stockist. Eventually I had to retrace my steps in order to repeat the experience.
It’s not for the purists amongst you. There isn’t really any chocolate or any banana. But for those (like me) that love a bit of fake banana, this really hits the spot. Bite into the soft outer coating and through a bright yellow light mouse of fake banana and then let the whole thing rest at the top of your mouth for a good minute as you suck in the sweetness.
Fake things with sweet tastes could also be a description applied to many of the sites on offer at Manly. I took a ferry there last weekend. In 1787, Captain Arthur Phillip of the Royal Navy left England with a fleet of ships to establish a colony in New South Wales. He was to be its first Governor. While exploring Port Jackson, Phillip was impressed by the “confidence and manly behaviour” of a group of aborigines in the northern reaches of the harbour, and called the place “Manly Cove”. (I love this. All naming should be like that.)
Today it is full of people surfing the sea, punching balls on the beach, or drinking beer in the bars. Manly pursuits prevail.
And this is surely the only place in the world where it would be both geographically and anatomically accurate to be labelled a ‘Manly Lifeguard’.
I took in the view and left.
A view I stayed longer with (for 360 degrees in fact) was from the Orbit Bar atop the 1967 Harry Seidler building in Australia Square.
At the brilliant suggestion of Sydney based artist Barbara Campbell, she, Daniel Brine, Jonathan Cooper and I, sat in very comfortable seats drinking a variety of expensive cocktails and eating warm nuts on a rotating platform with fabulous views across Sydney as the sun was setting. (For those people who were encouraging me to do the famous bridge walk: you don’t get to drink cocktails on that and it costs twice the price of my selected Lime and Ginger Gimlet, Nero Sangue, and The Burning Monk.)
We spent far too long giggling about the fact that we were on a moving circular disk 47 floors up. It has always been a fantasy of mine to dine in a rotating restaurant and although we only drank, it was somehow even better that way.
Day turned into evening and after 2 hours we were back to where we started, only it was darker outside.
Unfortunately everywhere we tried for a bite to eat afterwards was closed and we ended up with a burger and fries in Hungry Jacks on George Street. It was a real fall back down to earth.
Another fantasy, though more recently acquired, was the desire to see inside the concert hall of the Opera House, and not just to see but to hear something stirring. On this, my last night in Sydney I treated myself to Mahler 2: Resurrection, a gigantic work performed by Sydney Symphony and conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy, from which I have just returned.
After you get past the bun fight in the foyers (there are just so many people going to so many different things) you must then resist the temptation to purchase a Sydney Opera House Barbie (oh yes, really).
Then you enter the hall, in one of the giant sails. I had selected to sit in the ‘organ gallery’ behind the orchestra so that I could get a good view of the hall and take this photograph for you.
It meant I got a lot of percussion but I like that.
The piece is epic and with the most extraordinary finale. French horns and timpani off stage answer those on stage. A chorus of singers and two soloists are used sparsely but with pathos. I found myself deeply moved by the wall of sound and the ultimately uplifting and affirmative ending.
And now I must go to bed. Tomorrow I travel to Japan, a country which I think about a lot and that I am getting to love even more, each time I go.
I took a long weekend off and a one and a half hour plane journey to Melbourne. Almost certainly I wouldn’t have made this trip had it not been for the fact that I had been invited to stay as a guest of my friend Andrew Carcelli, who I had not seen for 16 years (or heard from for 15).
As my one personal connection in Australia, I did a little Googling to track him down and an email to his former employer was happily forwarded.
In 1994/5 Andrew was travelling around Europe, and we met behind the bars and in the private dining rooms of the ENO (English National Opera) at the London Coliseum, where we were both working. It wasn’t long before we were close friends and that four of us (Andrew and his girlfriend Gitte Hansen from Copenhagen, Ben Zühlcke, now long standing friend of mine, and I) were all living in a one-bedroom flat in North Lambeth (a flat I was later to tenant and eventually to buy).
It was a heady summer. We were all just over the cusp of adulthood. It was pretty much a case of anything goes.
Andrew returned to Australia and in those pre-email days it wasn’t long before we forgot to be in touch.
I flew out of Sydney on the 11 o’clock flight on 11.11.11, a fact that was not lost on the Virgin Australia ground staff team member as she giggled her way through the boarding announcement. It was not lost on me either, being as it is, a fitting time for reflection and remembrance.
Standing at the gate of Melbourne Airport it was difficult to look at Andrew and see a decade and a half of change. It seemed like 16 weeks had elapsed rather than 16 years. The real change came when we arrived at his home, and I met his partner Tara and their two children, Maya (7) and Luca (4).
Of the various encounters that Andrew arranged for me over my three-day visit, special mention has to be made of the trip to Hanging Rock. This was an unexpected treat, as I had no idea that it was driving distance from Melbourne and if I had thought about it would be the very place (perhaps in the whole of Australia) that I would choose to visit.
Hanging Rock, the place where “history and mystery meet” (that is according to the Macedon Range website) was made internationally famous by Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel, and Peter Weir’s subsequent film Picnic at Hanging Rock. Geologically it is a mamelon: a rock formation created over 6 million years ago by the eruption of thick lava through a narrow vent in the bedrock. As the lava is not fluid, it does not flow away; instead it congeals around the vent, forming a small hill or mound on the surface. The outflow from successive eruptions forms additional layers on top, and the resulting pile of layers stand over 100 metres above the surrounding surface. As Hanging Rock’s magma cooled and contracted, it split into rough columns. These weathered over time into the many pinnacles that can be seen today.
The film Picnic at Hanging Rock (Australia’s first international hit) tells of the disappearance of three girls and one of their teachers from Mrs Appleyard’s private boarding school during a disastrous picnic at the rock on St Valentine’s day 1900. It was released in 1975 and I must have watched it when it was first broadcast in the UK in the late 70s or early 80s. I will have been no older than 10. It made an extremely powerful impression on me. So much so in fact, that I remember, despite being an extremely reluctant reader at the time, I picked up the book (possibly from my elder sister’s shelf) and worked my way through the 200 or so pages, desperate to try and untangle what had happened to Miranda, Irma Leopold, Marion Quade and their mathematics mistress Miss Greta McCraw.
It was with the same sense of curiosity that I searched through the shelves of Melbourne’s second hand bookshops to find the identical edition that I had read nearly 30 years before. I am quite certain that some of you will recognise the cover.
Perhaps it is best left to Joan Lindsay to describe the site that meets your eye as your carriage enters the plain on which the rock stands.
While they were talking the angle of vision had gradually altered to bring Hanging Rock into sudden startling view. Directly ahead, the great volcanic mass rose up slabbed and pinnacled like a fortress from the empty yellow plain. The three girls in the box seat could see the vertical lines of the rocky walls, now and then gashed with indigo shade, patches of grey green dogwood, outcrops of boulders even at a distance immense and formidable. At the summit, apparently bare of living vegetation, a jagged line of rock cut across the serene blue sky.
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lyndsey, (Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1977 [1967]) p.19/20
As the vertical facade of the Rock drew nearer, the massive slabs and soaring rectangles repudiated the easy charms of its fern-clad lower slopes. Now outcrops of prehistoric rock and giant boulders forced their way to the surface above layers of rotting vegetation and animal decay: bones, feathers, birdlime, the sloughed skins of snakes; some with jagged horns and jutting spikes, obscene knobs and scabby carbuncles; others smoothly humped and rounded by the passing of a million years.
Ibid., p.86/87
We climbed the tarmac path, past the warning signs.
It really would be too dangerous without some intervention, especially in today’s litigious culture. There is at least one plaque to a fallen child.
At the top, I was a bit concerned that Luca’s bravado jumping was testing all our catching skills. The ‘safety features’ are actually very minimal and it was remarkably easy to enter into the mystery once more.
As Tara unwound the tale to seven year old Maya, the child’s ‘what?’, ‘when?’, ‘how?’, ‘why?’ interrogation, allowed us all to re-examine the facts as they have been presented.
The place is definitely special. A giant’s petrified spew in an otherwise flat landscape. The faces of rocks stare back at you.
No wonder so many people fear it as a dangerous place. It certainly is atmospheric.
Although we had already eaten, I forced down an orange ice-lolly, just to have had a picnic at Hanging Rock at the same place that Miranda had eaten the fruit jelly, just ahead of her misadventure.
The trip took me back beyond the fifteen years since I had been in contact with Andrew to a time fifteen years before that, as a child in Edinburgh, and the development of my own imagination.
Enough of the rock.
Back in Melbourne, Andrew took me to the State Library of Victoria. If ever books were ready for the opera, it is in the ornate buttressed balconies of the La Trobe Reading Room.
One the plane back to Sydney, the abstract expressionist sunset, the picnic at Hanging Rock, especially after last week’s Klimt leaf, got me thinking once more of how nature imitates art.
Perhaps it would help with capitals. This week I have had a Golden Gaytime.
This Australian favourite, a survivor from another ‘ice age’ (okay, 1959), really does taste of the olden days. I don’t know quite why, but I get a similar sensation with particular brands of soft marsh mallows and liquorice allsorts. Its as if this particular sweet taste, that has been delighting people in the same way for decades, can somehow transport you back in time. It’s a kind of false memory syndrome because you ‘remember’ a time of which you could have no living knowledge as it precedes the moment of your own birth. (All this from one ice-cream on a stick.)
Advertised as ‘ICE CREAM WITH COMPOUND CHOCOLATE AND BISCUIT (14%)’(why does that word ‘compound’ seem so out of place?) a Golden Gaytime is a toffee and vanilla centered ice-cream sandwich, rolled in pieces of broken biscuit. It has the comfort and sweetness of condensed milk.
The name is clearly a survivor from a less politicised day.
Names have preoccupied me this week. Coming from the UK to Sydney, you are aware at how the map of England has been redrawn: Hoxton, Enfield, Kings Cross, Oxford Street, Balmoral, Hyde Park. As must have been pointed out by a thousand thousand tourists, the list goes on. But I had a strange moment of familiarity traveling out to Western Sydney for a meeting this week, when the train pulled into Croydon.
Croydon was the town on the outskirts of London that my Grandma lived in all my life, until her death aged 98 in January 2010. For years I would go and visit her by train, and pulling into Croydon station Sydney filled me with a strange heartache. This time the memories were real.
By way of an aside, the trains here in Sydney are genius. They are double-decker for a start, which is very exciting, but even more so, you can change the direction of the seats with a gentle tug on the conveniently placed handles. So you can choose to face in the direction of travel, or create a banquette with your traveling companions. The whole mechanism is sprung, so the maneuver can be made with very little difficulty. This should be standard on all trains.
Of course the names of the stations (and the streets, parks and districts) are a continual reminder of the colonial history here in Australia. This was emphasised for me this week in discussions with Performance Space Director Daniel Brine about whether or not there should be an Acknowledgement of Country before my artist’s talk.
Acknowledgement of Country is the (now standard) way in which public meetings are opened. These statements offer themselves as a kind of reconciliation. For example:
I would like to acknowledge the Dharug people who are the traditional custodians of this land. I would also like to pay respect to the elders past and present of the Dharug nation and extend that respect to other Aboriginal people present.
My feeling on first hearing an Acknowledgement of Country was that it was a kind of apology that ‘normalised’ the colonial history, as in, ‘everything is OK because we acknowledge injustices have taken place’. (Complaining to my elder sister that she is useless at being in touch, her response: “I know; I’m crap,” produces a kind of stasis. It’s as if her acknowledgement of her crapness forestalls any change of behaviour.)
But I have now come to understand Acknowledgement of Country as a necessity, as something that just has to be done. Australia is young; Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander peoples have only had citizenship for 42 years. Many wounds are raw.
In the end we decided that it wouldn’t be a necessity for my talk. It is an established etiquette for meetings rather than presentations. Here is my name, on a blackboard outside the Performance Space Clubhouse.
It was okay. I wasn’t at my best. People were kind. But I’ve got much more into the swing of my research this week and the meetings have all been productive and interesting.
Messages from home have often contained the question: have you seen any nature yet? Well, not really in the way that you mean, no. But I did see this amazing ‘Gustav Klimt’ leaf on my way to the gym on Tuesday.
From the moment you step onto the Quantas flight you are aware of the Australian way. Faded surfers in butcher’s aprons offer you beer and ice-cream and encourage you to relax. But the famous ‘take it easy’ Australian sensibility belies the worker-bee ethic of many of those active in the cultural sector that I have met in my first week here.
There is one very immediate difference between the cultural sector in the UK and Australia: here people want to make time for you. They are keen to talk. This is lucky for me as the main activity that I am tasked with is talking. I have over 30 meetings booked in already, with more being scheduled.
I am ‘Thinker in Residence’ at Performance Space in Sydney, a cross-disciplinary arts organisation based at the incredible CarriageWorks in Redfern. Here under the auspices of being the first ‘Artist Fellow’ on the Clore Leadership Programme, I am exploring what it might mean for artists to be leaders. It is a research trip of sorts, meeting with key cultural players on the Sydney scene, discovering how they work with artists, and learning about the many ARI (artist run initiatives) that abound here.
There hasn’t been so much time to ‘site see’ but on the Saturday after I arrived, the Director of Performance Space, Daniel Brine and his partner Jonathan Cooper, took me to Sydney Fish Market to buy our dinner. The market consists of a series of shops selling, well if not quite every possible thing from the sea, then at least the ones that you might want to eat.
The oysters looked particularly good and so I bought half a dozen as a contribution to our meal. Pretty much everything in Sydney is unaffordable. The Australian dollar is so strong against sterling, you feel pinched just buying a bottle of water. But this was the exception. Oysters are cheap. In fact you can get 3 large oysters for the price of 1 small bottle of mineral water.
The thing about (good) fish markets is that they smell of the sea, not of fish. The fish is all so fresh that there is none of that nasty rancid smell that you get if you open a supermarket container of out-of-date tuna. The Sydney avifauna know where to come for scraps however. Giant handsome Pelicans waddle around the carpark.
And these Ibis (the pigeons of Sydney apparently) stick their long beaks into the bins. I think they are after the dinner leftovers from the market restaurants rather than the entrails of salmon gutted for squeamish cooks.
Daniel bought Morton Bay Bugs (the very ones being bagged in this picture). They are a kind of antediluvian cross between a giant prawn and a legless lobster.
And they are delicious. Daniel prepared them with green peppercorns, a cream sauce and a pastry crust. They taste, well, somewhere between a prawn and lobster I guess.
Performance Space works out of CarriageWorks, a conversion of a former railway carriage and blacksmith workshops. The building retains many ‘original features’ as an estate agent might have it, but has now several substantial theatres, rehearsal rooms, gallery spaces and workshops.
It also (this is very exciting) is home to the largest glitter ball in Sydney. Look: it’s got it’s own special cradle trolley thing.
CarriageWorks is lovely to look at but I can’t help thinking that the architecture is a bit stifling for Performance Space, an organisation whose stated aim is ‘the exploration and experience of new forms, new ideas, and new contexts’.
On Wednesday 2nd everyone in the CarriageWorks offices gathered round a giant television for the Melbourne Cup, “the race which stops the nation”. The assembled crowd pays $2 (could buy you a couple of oysters but not a bottle of water) and draw horses names from an envelope. One of mine, Illo (surely a bad name for anything, let alone a potential champion stallion) was well out in front for the first three-quarters of the race before coming in second last.
In the end it was a photo finish, the result of which took 3 minutes to come through from the race officials. It was a bit of an anti-climax for the staff of CarriageWorks as one lucky guy had drawn both horses that were battling to be a nostril ahead. Here is the photo of the winning moment.
Several of my meetings have taken me down to Circular Quay and Sydney Harbour, the iconic meeting of land and water and of some of the most famous architecture in the world. Sydney Opera House is magnificent. It has that sense of ‘coming home’ the way the skyline of New York does. It’s just so familiar from its reproduction in film and news that you feel like you already know it. What I felt about it, staring across the bay, was that it defied time. It is both a kind of prehistoric monument, a giant carapace left on the shore, but at the same time of the future, visiting from a more advanced universe. One thing that I had never noticed before in reproductions is that it is scaly. The ‘sails’ as they are known, are like a giant jigsaw puzzle of scales.
Opposite the Opera House is Sydney Harbour Bridge. Nice. Fits in well. But I still feel loyal to the Ponte D Maria Pia designed by Gustave Eiffel for the city of Porto. If you look closely at this picture you will see people on the ‘bridge climb’. I’ve been asked several times if I plan to do this. My response has been that I would do it with a new found love. It is very expensive. Besides which, no Sydney-sider that I have spoken to has ever done it themselves.
On the way to a meeting at MCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) which is located right on the harbour edge, I could not fail to notice that the Rhapsody of the Seas, an immense cruise ship, was moored by the International Passenger Terminal.
Perching on a motorised dingy, starboard side, with nothing but a standard DIY roller, some poor chap was tasked the challenge of painting this floating city.
For the past days Porto has been preparing for the annual festivities of their patron saint, Saint John, or São João.
Funfairs, giant screens, and temporary stages with mammoth sound systems occupy the centre of the city. Balconies are decorated.
At street corners impromptu markets shift giant bundles of scented plants: mint, tarragon, lavender.
Pots of ‘manjerico’ or basil bush abound. The tradition goes that boyfriends give these to their sweethearts with love poems. St John is apparently the patron saint of lovers (though when I recount such research details to my hosts they look at me blankly).
Manjerico is one of the icons of São João, with paper decorations of pots of basil strung up in shop windows and between lamp posts everywhere. In the picture above you will notice that a paper basil pot has been stuck into the plant itself, in a kind of absurd repetition of referent and representation. To me this basil looked and smelt exactly like the culinary ingredient you would get in any well-stocked UK supermarket but when I suggested making a salad with these leaves of manjerico I was laughed off as a quaint foreigner. Subsequent internet trawling hasn’t provided any firm corroboration one way or the other. Can anyone tell me: is manjerico edible or not and if not, why not?
Garlic is everywhere.
…and part of this is to do with a rite that nobody is entirely sure about in which you ward off evil spirits.
Flowering garlic is particularly popular, the white bulbs and long green stems ending in a sphere of purple petals.
The smell off these stalls is pretty heady.
Historically, flowering garlic has been used for the Porto São João tradition of gently hitting fellow citizens on the head. Although its original significance is lost and nobody seems to care anyway, some surmise that it is a ‘good luck’ ritual (warding away evil spirits again) that dates back pre-Christianity to pagan ceremonial. At some stage in the history of the São João festivities, someone randomly decided that garlic was too smelly and that it would be better to use plastic hammers instead. Again it is impossible to find anyone that can remember the switch over. Surely it must be in living memory? Plastics aren’t that old.
So alongside the traditional herb sellers are people selling plastic hammers.
I was notified that this was a festivity must-have (“Now, have you bought a plastic hammer yet?”) and so made sure at the supermarket, while stocking up on other essentials, that a plastic hammer was in my shopping basket. (I thought I was being clever opting for this half-flute-half-hammer but the flute sang not one note.)
Mobile kiosks selling beer, popcorn, and farturas suddenly sprang up.
In my toilet-humour way, I couldn’t help but read this sign for farturas as ‘fart-your-ass’, which is how it read to me trying to spell out the pronunciation. This schoolboy viewpoint was compounded when I saw them.
Actually these are churros, not ‘fart-your-ass’. Churros are basically the same as ‘fart-your-ass’ only they have fillings and ‘fart-your-ass’ are plain. Either way, they both look like things that you would, erm, fart out of your ass. (Sorry.)
No, I didn’t try one.
The real celebrations don’t start until the evening and run all through the night until the morning of the Thursday of São João. I met up with NEC Artistic Director Joclécio Azevedo and he took me to a street party of some friend of his. The doors of all the houses in the street were open and people were coming and going carrying various bowls of different foods and drinks. The delicious but impenetrable corn bread, ‘broa’ was almost impossible to cut.
It is thick, dense, chewy and delicious. Amongst the nicest bread I have tasted. Alongside the broa are served barbecued sardines. These are extremely popular and you see these tiny stoves all along the streets. Joclécio told me that he went that afternoon to ‘Media Markt’ (a technology store in central Porto) and there, next to the new televisions and computers inside the shop, someone was grilling sardines on a camping stove. We all laughed nervously imagining the lingering smell on DVD players for months to come.
As the sun sets, one of the nicest activities of São João takes place. People start to send paper ‘hot air’ balloons into the sky. The process is quite fiddly because you (obviously) don’t want to burn the paper. Friends and neighbours gather round to hold out the balloon itself, as someone ignites the flammable resin at its base. You then kind of puff out the balloon waiting until the air inside warms and the balloon inflates. It then rises, magically – alright not magically but rather scientifically – into the night sky.
These balloons have officially been banned by the municipal authorities as a fire risk but that doesn’t stop them from being sold almost everywhere and hundreds of them glittering through the darkness.
At about midnight, after dinner and illuminations, we headed off to the banks of the Douro, fortified by a quick cup of coffee in a late night café. There were throngs of people everywhere. Where did they all come from?
At intervals between Ribeira in town and the beach at Foz people were dancing to the extremely loud music playing from the temporary stages.
If you were hungry, there were plenty of stalls, including this one with a (once) full hog on a spit.
Just in case you hadn’t bought your hammer yet, trucks full of them were being hawked.
And everywhere, but everywhere, people are hammering each other.
If you imagine this to be some sort of excuse for violence then you couldn’t be further from truth. In fact the people doing the most hammering are the oldies, who hammer every single person an arm and hammer length away. One old dear stood by the roadside traffic jam and hammered the cars in the tailback until they wound down their windows. Popping her hammer in hand through the opening, she boinked each of the occupants on the head. That was brilliant. For the younger generations, hammering has become a kind of acknowledgment that you fancy someone, so they are generally much more choosy and there isn’t so much same sex hammering! The thing is, of course, that you end up wanting to be hammered because it brings you into social space and acknowledges your presence. And if it is someone cute hammering you, you are, needless to say, flattered, even if they are doing it for good luck rather than anything else.
So crowds of people hammer each other all night long in what has to be one of the strangest and most unique cultural phenomena I have witnessed.
At about 3.30 in the morning I gave up. The coffee high had subsided and I was rapidly tiring. I walked past the neon hammers back to my apartment where the music pounded through the airwaves, and past my earplugs, from all sides, until well past 6.
The following day I packed up my bags and headed for the airport. I am really pleased to have spent time in Portugal. It is a totally new discovery for me. As a child I had a friend at school whose mother was Portuguese and for many years all that Portugal was in my mind, was a funny language that my friend’s mother spoke. As an adult, it was the literature of Saramago, who died less than a fortnight ago, that gave me some insight into the country. But oddly enough, it was in Asia that I got my first prolonged exposure to Portugal. It was the Taiga historical dramas of NHK broadcasts and the Nanban (“Southern barbarians”) art of 17th Century Japan, both of which document the arrival of the first Westerners at Nagasaki, who were Portuguese, that introduced me to this oldest of European colonial powers.
I also really feel that we have achieved something with Viver a Rua, the project to rename a Porto street after a local citizen. During the 4 weeks that the competition was open, from 12th May to 10th June 2010, we held 6 workshops (with the themes of family, history and citizenship), worked with 20 volunteers in 5 separate actions around the city, talking to hundreds of people, engaging them in the themes of the project; we distributed 30,000 fliers, received thousands of hits on the website www.viverarua.com and accepted 253 full nominations both through the post and via the internet. The project became a topic of discussion on television and radio, in newspapers, magazines and the internet. It will take some time before a final winner can be announced. The negotiations with the City Hall have only just begun in earnest. But whatever the final outcome, Viver a Rua has been about offering the citizens of Porto the possibility to imagine what the city means to them personally and to think about it as a social space made up not just of the great men and women that have contributed so much but also of the ordinary people, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, the disadvantaged and the forgotten.
From my own perspective, I have discovered a fascinating and beautiful country; if you haven’t been there I strongly suggest that you go.
The first stage of judging for Viver a Rua having been completed (sorry, the results are strictly confidential) I took the opportunity of a four-day trip to Lisboa.
Wow. What a fantastic city.
Lisbon is a city of hills and views, of winding ancient alleyways and six lane avenues. With so much mountainous topography the transport system is key. It is a delight. Perfect little trams rush round hairpin bends and stagger up impossibly steep climbs. It was with a real schoolboy glee that I sat on the number 28 to the end of the line and then rode it all the way back again.
There are a series of ‘elevators’ that make one journey up and down continuously. Elevador da Bica travels from the riverside to town and back again, the street’s inhabitants clearing a path with a well-practiced millisecond to spare.
More spectacular but no less practical is Elevador de Santa Justa. If it is possible to be a little bit in love with an elevator then I stake my claim to Elevador de Santa Justa. Built by Gustave Eiffel’s pupil Raul Mésnier, it has the advantage over the Eiffel Tower of being incredibly useful. Not only is it an extraordinary city icon it also gets you through the equivalent of nine stories of city steps in a few seconds.
The brilliant thing about these transport wonders is that they are entirely integrated into the metropolitan ticket system. So although they do attract sightseers who come along simply for the ride, they are also part of the working fabric of the city.
From the top of Elevador de Santa Justa the city spreads out below and above, with the Castelo de São Jorge on the horizon.
Up at the battlements of the Castelo, Elevador de Santa Justa beams.
From the eastern side of the castle you can just make out the Ponte Vasco de Gama, Europe’s longest bridge at 17.2 kilometres.
This tantalising glimpse encouraged me to go to Parque das Nações, the ‘new city’ built for the 1998 Expo, but the slightly crappy funicular that erm, just goes along the riverbank, had stopped for the day and I found the whole ‘buildings of the future’ thing a bit soulless after the historic centre.
Buildings that have soul oozing out of their mortar include Torre de Belém, the early 16th Century fort built at the edge of the Tejo to defend Lisbon’s harbour.
And the incredible Mosteiro dos Jerónimos built around the same time to celebrate Vasco da Gama’s ‘discovery’ of India.
As with so much of the old colonial powers of Europe, the marvels we wonder at now were created through the exploitation of trade routes and slaves. This is a history that is not well documented for the visitor. I was staying at Atelier RE.AL, a creative hub in Rua do Poço dos Negros (‘the well of the blacks’) and it took a pointed question to my hosts to discover that this ‘well’ was a pit into which slaves were thrown.
Lisbon is the city of the literature of José Saramago, the Nobel Laureate whose death was announced on the day I arrived and whose body was flown back from his adopted home in Lanzarote to a state sponsored wake, the gravitas of which would only be afforded to popstars or Royalty in the UK.
By a complete coincidence, I found myself having dinner with the staff of RE.AL in the restaurant that was Saramago’s Lisbon regular, and where he held the wedding party of his marriage to the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río.
In this modest Portuguese eatery, the walls cluttered with snaps of their most renowned customer, the staff recalled with fondness and respect this most treasured of Portuguese writers. They were recalling him as a man. There was no discussion of literature. I wonder if they have ever read his books. If you haven’t you should strongly consider it. In The Double the protagonist is sitting in front of the television and spots a man playing a minor role in the soap opera who looks exactly – but exactly – like him; the novel follows the search for his identical other. In The History of the Siege of Lisbon the plot revolves around the consequences of a proof-reader inserting the word ‘not’ into a historical chronicle, changing the way in which the past is read. Saramago’s novels start from a very simple ‘what would happen if…’ scenario. They are brilliantly crafted.
On the day of his funeral, I went down to the City Hall where his body lay in an open casket to pay my own respects but I couldn’t get past the international media or the Portuguese dignitaries.
Not wanting to spend too much time with a corpse, I decided to forgo filing past (perhaps if I had waited long enough I would have found my chance) and carried on exploring the city.
Saramago’s face, pensive and erudite, suddenly covered billboards everywhere. “Obrigado José Saramago” they read. The authorities must have been planning for his death for some time, with a stack of posters at the ready.
Between the death of the nation’s cultural icon and their football team’s assassination of the People’s Republic of Korea 7-0 in South Africa’s World Cup, the city had plenty to talk about in the bars and cafes. “Saramago” and “Ronaldo” were uttered everywhere with unavoidable pride.
Saving the best until last.
I know it might sound disingenuous to say that the highlight of my trip to this incredible European capital was a custard tart but I promise you that this was not just any custard tart, this was a pastéis de nata, made to a secret recipe in the Antiga Confeitaria de Belém since 1837. I admit that the circumstances of my consumption were in themselves a relief, undoubtedly heightening the pleasure. Having walked half way across the city, taken a wrong train, and having had an encounter with a ticket inspector, I was suffering from a sugar low and, at the very least, needed a sit down. My expectations were also not that high. I don’t really like custard tarts. The thing was plonked, rather than placed, in front of me. But the second my lower lip brushed the thin layers of delicate crisp pastry and my upper lip the soft yellow custard cream, everything in the world suddenly seemed alright. I was completely absorbed by what was happening in my mouth.
This confeitaria can shift up to 30,000 of these creamy concoctions on a single day in the weekend. Their seemingly never-ending series of vaulted rooms can seat up to 2,000 people at a time. There are 40 women employed whose sole job it is just to roll out the pastry cases. Although pastéis de nata are sold all over Portgual, these pastéis de Belém are famous throughout the world with good reason.
They are not overly sweet. The custard is just set. The combination of flavours is comfortingly familiar and yet deliciously unique. The real pleasure – they were 15 minutes out of the oven warm.
Perfect with my bica it was a culinary moment of perfection. I immediately ordered a second.
While the competition for Viver a Rua has been drawing to a close, I have been wandering around the city waiting and wishing for something to ‘happen’. So imagine how my curiosity was aroused as I witnessed hoards of school children rush out of Escola de Carlos Alberto, ushered by anxious teachers. The roar of fire engines and the arrival of Sapadores Porto, who quickly unreeled their hose, followed the exodus almost immediately.
My excitement at being the only person around with a camera to document the burning down of a school in the centre of historic Porto was tempered by the shock and relief of seeing children who had been trapped by the blaze, wearing oxygen masks, escorted by the firemen out of the building. They seemed unscathed but surely they should be taken to hospital for a check up. Shouldn’t someone call an ambulance?
The smoke became very intense and I began to get worried that things were shifting out of control.
But hang on a second. This thick smoke doesn’t smell of anything much more than a 1980s disco. It was only when I overheard someone listlessly turn to their neighbour and utter the word “simulação” that I realised this was simply a drill; a highly theatrical drill maybe but a drill nevertheless.
When I was at school the fire drills consisted of us ‘forming and orderly queue’ in the playground to be head counted by the form teacher. There were no fire engines, no firemen, no smoke and certainly no friends in oxygen masks.
As the fog machine was switched off and they waited for the smoke effect to dissipate, the class sat in a circle on the pavement outside and cheered the burly blokes who had, erm, pressed the ‘off’ button and given them a break from basic algebra.
This cluster of firemen was another to add to my growing collection of men in groups. They are everywhere here in Porto. Gathering on the street to watch football:
Playing cards in the park:
Lounging around on the beach. There is only one woman in this photograph, out on a rock, on her own:
It is extremely rare to see women gathered together. I guess they are all still chained in the kitchen, or like Dona Jacinta who manages the building I am in, permanently sweeping the wood effect linoleum in the communal hallway.
Of course it is perfectly ordinary to see men and woman together too. In fact, Porto is quite kissy kissy in public places. Just along the shore from the group of blokes on the beach, were this semi-nude older couple dancing away. It was a lovely sight. From the esplanade above, the few of us who were there let out a collective sigh of admiration.
Perhaps it is the approach of summer, or (more likely) because I have been on my own here for too long but I’m beginning to see sex in everything. The priapic Torre dos Clérgios is probably the most famous of Porto’s monuments and certainly one of the most popular. It is the highest tower in Portugal, with 6 floors and 225 steps. That doesn’t seem so tall but given that it was completed in 1763 (by Nicholas Nasoni) I guess it was a wonder of its day that has endured.
It has a strange floor level suicide window from which a not fat person could easily choose to take a jump. I crawled on my hands and knees to the opening to have a peer out and then slunk back. Actually I’ve discovered since being here in Porto, for the first time in my life, that I have vertigo. I have never been troubled by heights before and I don’t know what has brought it on. I experience it as both a fear of falling and a desire to push myself over the edge: quite a worrying combination.
There are lots of bells inside as you might expect.
But what I wasn’t expecting was this organ type thing to operate them. I thought that bells were usually ‘rung’ but here it seems they are ‘played’.
I poked my camera over the stone battlements at the top to take some photos. Here you can see the orange roofs of the city stretching down the hill to the Douro.
Here are the ruins of a shopping mall, a famous blot on the city, which looks like the set from a science fiction film about the end of the world.
And here you can see Lello, commonly described as the most beautiful purpose built bookshop in the world.
It is extremely beautiful, with its gynaecological staircase tonguing out into the centre of the floor but it is not the best.
The books are oddly divided between highly specific set textbooks for the University just opposite and guidebooks to Portugal for the throngs of tourists that come to tick off another attraction.
One attraction that I will very sadly miss (as it takes place after I have left Portugal) is the second Festival Erótico Medieval.
Yes, it really is a four-day series of ‘sexy things’ in Medieval costume, including a ‘Campeonato Internacional Strip Masculino’ and a ‘Lingerie Restaurant’. How on earth someone came up with this idea, I can barely imagine. ‘You know what I think we really need here in the north of Portugal, is to celebrate the Middle Ages by taking all our clothes off and pony trekking in a pair of armoured wrist bands.’ Still, this is its second year, so they must have the interest.
