a cosy oyster cloister

tokyo, early winter.

2007-12-16T20:38:00.000-05:00

lately gotten crisp here. just now there are yellow gingko leaves all over the streets.

last night i went to a yakitori-ya, essentially a skewered chicken dining bar. room for about 15 around a counter, a display case with neat rows of raw ingredients. a polished cypress wood counter. you sit, warm yourself with a hot steamed face towel, order some warm sake, and then are asked what grilled items you will have.

there is a sparely written menu on wooden plaques hanging on the wall. ominously, there are no prices.

you call out your order, specify if you would prefer the skewers seasoned with salt, or sauce - a thick blend of soy, sake, vinegar and sugar.

we have duck, toothsome rather than tender; coarsely-minced chicken meatballs; dark meat, white meat - but only faintly seared on the outside, with the middle still pink, and smeared with wasabi (to kill the salmonella...?) - cartilages, livers, gizzards (splayed and flattened), the cut near the backside, bunches of skin, the 'back-liver' (sekigimo, found at the crook of the back), and an unborn egg.

in the honored tradition of offal euphemisms, they don't call it that, of course. they call it chochin, which means lantern.

the gleaming half-formed orb of a yolk dangling off a skewer does in fact resemble a handheld lantern, the sort that i used to carry around at night in our garden during the mid-autumn festival. not to put too fine a point on it, it's all the best hits of poultry on a stick, a triple-flavored chicken lollipop. as well as the golden yolky globe, it also has the dark-marrowish meat and a dubiously white bit which looks like white meat but presumably includes some sort of chick-cawl as it's chewy and slightly crunchy.

we finish with rice topped with gently simmered chicken mincemeat, and a small cup of chicken soup laced with thin leek strands, sticky on the lips with collagen.

then there is this cafe, which i can only describe as New Romanticist industrial ruin. you enter a building that still houses an automobile servicing facility, climb the staircase whose corners are littered strategically with rusting ornaments and disused farming tools, stuffed with a sprig of dried herbs, or placed next to a small weathered clay vessel.

you can see the crumbling ramshackle wrought iron vaulting of the ceiling in a shade of sickly blue, reams of rust peeling luxuriously off the window frames, crud on the windows, tarnish worn smooth on the back of your chair. they've hung other assorted iron implements on the walls, evidently chosen for both their tectonic strength and weedy delicacy, monotone geometrical etchings, a handful of dead flowers placed just so next to a small anvil, a rusting horseshoe, a little twig of a vase.

we have soy and brown rice lattes laced with brown sugar, and a mealy green tea roll cake stuffed with sweet potato and red bean cream. the tableware, of course, has also only recently entered a state of delicate decay. you warm your hands on the rough stuccoed surface of the cup, you wipe your mouth with a plain flannel towelette carefully chosen for its rustic overtones. it comes on its own slightly tarnished aluminium tray.

the food, such as it is, is a blandly flavored still life. everything carefully (or is that carelessly?) arranged on gently bruised earthenware pottery: ten grain rice, organic miso soup with tofu, boiled vegetables with a sesame dip, simmered hijiki seaweed and dried beancurd strips with flakes of sea salt.

廃墟の魅力

2007-08-29T23:52:00.000-04:00

there are relentless weeds in my yard some of which i've clipped the tops off of and placed in a small glass tealight holder as a wabi ornament. waking up early yesterday, biking bleary-eyed to the kyuu-kyuu for some extra bowls, milk, and carrots, we served brunch for three at ten-thirty. green chilli thepla, carrot sambar, dry potato curry, cucumber raita and chai, followed by carrot halva with shaved pistachios and vanilla ice cream. we sat on the floor on cushions in varying shades of faded blue, enjoying the drowsy lazing about of late summer.

later, the clouds muddling over into a thick woolliness, we walked up the meguro river to a studiedly dishevelled showa-era house with mustard walls, cracking wooden ceiling fixtures that exposed half an attic, midcentury office furniture and an intimate audience with the nestling cicadas thronging the neighboring trees. a view of the verandah stained with rain puddles and fraying white paint on the woodwork. cherry tree foliage overhanging a cobblestoned canal addling along at "my-pace". opatoca is a classic LOHAS cafe, modelled after equal parts of bali, okinawa, and southern france. the bakery downstairs huddles behind a weedy terrace threaded through with ivy and fig trees, offering red bean and edamame buns; the adjacent "bistro" is a converted hiraya that now channels scandinavian living rooms and london formica caffs. the upstairs portion where we were was too postmodern to trace a properly discernable lineage of interior design. it was overwhelmingly environmental, windows thrown open to the ebbing of the stream, the amble and shuffle of nakameguro hipsters, carelessly abandoned bicycles propped against rust-flecked railings. we sit, indulge 8-month old iroha who tries to eat my leather rabbit-shaped keyring, sip the iced tea laced with cloves, flip through araki nobuyoshi's showa-era tokyo photos and "sotokoto", a LOHAS-themed life catalog that tells you about bread collectives and environmental projects for fleeters.

it starts to sprinkle, and we head for an ivy-covered brown building a few bridges past the treehouse. we sip light-roast green tea and eat kinako-dusted hon-warabi with carved wooden sweet-forks. the soundtrack is joao gilberto's "white" album, which like all the other textures in the tearoom has been modulated to a certain shade of mellow. the view through the wide strip windows is streaked with rubber-sheathed electrical cables, a visual slight to the cherry leaves dancing in front of public housing units fronting the side of the canal. this is tokyo's trick, a serious urban planning lacuna that they've turned into an unexpected joy; puncutuating the mundane with the "wabi." the charm of this is evident but its source isn't, at least not immediately; until you realize that it's this thrown-together materialsness that makes a point of leftovers and rubbish, trashiness and beauty. ruins (and more generally, ruinedness) are doubly pathetic in tokyo, a city that lost so much first-order patina but made up for it with an understanding of how best to redeem that loss, and turn it into a kind of pastoral. so much of new york is merely grungy and unpleasant, whereas tokyo is aesthetically self-assured of its own controlled decay.

中夏の暑さ

2007-07-25T22:28:00.000-04:00

the spring rains have stopped and we are in the full sweaty fetid bloom of summer. the thing with this time of year is that tokyo's postmodern acrylicky skyline is at its gaudy worst. there's the reflective glare bouncing off the polished vitrines in thirteen storey shopping centers, marble facades from the roman-style "mansions," layered industrial finishes in steel and aluminium gleaming fiercely against bauhaus concrete. yesterday was just such an overly exposed day. like some bad 70s film about parched californian suburbs (the graduate?), except this time the unsympathetic surfaces make the light saturation a nightmare. with my friend i ducked into a small fish restaurant hung with round paper lanterns, a polished concrete floor and reed mat back seating area laid with blue and white cushions and settled down for horse mackerel tartare with ginger and spring onions, chilled shellfish gelee with mushrooms, eggplant pickles, rice and miso soup drawn from tuna innards.

then it was off to the "old" downtown area, ginza, which used to be the parisian boulevard of the 30s with approximately the same atmosphere and social caliber and connotation. nowadays it is about as charming as fifth avenue. meaning, the european connection got lost in the years, and it is american in spirit with far more wearying density. i went to see a cai guo qiang exhibition, a chinese artist who studied art in japan and then went on to a charmingly traditional patron-artist relationship with shiseido cosmetics. while greying women in hats and lace gloves sit upstairs in the art deco cafe taking pound cakes and earl grey tea on fine bone china, cai's work downstairs in the gallery basically consists of various flammable chemical powders set aflame on japanese rice paper (previously treated to make it resistant to the flames, presumably), with the resulting flame trails leaving their trace of destruction behind. it's powerful stuff, quite "environmental" in the heidggerian sense...

the afternoon heat was more environmental than ever, as fat tourists in shorts and sun visors trampled around the pavement, feeling squelchy and wrinkled by lurid sunlight and all those glaring reflections. escape to the french-japanese institute, a nicely patinaed fifties corbusian building with a "double revolution" tower by junzo sakakura, one of several devoted corby disciples who gave the city its characteristic mid-century modern-brutal face after the tabula rasa of WWII (there is a lovingly obsessive retrospective of corby with mockups of studios and small commissions at the mori art museum at the moment). the refugee film festival is showing at the nichifutsu gakuin, and i went to a cambodian film by rithy panh, a little heavy on the moralizing flashbacks but capturing perfectly that note of fatalistic third-world wretched capital city squalor and the hopeless capering about of its inhabitants amid documentary-verity but stunningly picturesque slums, towering makeshift piles of apartments, light industry, workshops and nightclubs pulsing with square dance beats and too-bright strobe lights.

the day pulled to a sultry close with the sun setting behind streaky clouds, the sky a dark lavender. back in kichijoji, stooping beneath the noren languidly flapping in a light breeze and sliding back the wooden shuttered doors, we settled into a two-person counter for dashimaki (omelet made with fish and kelp stock for extra wetness, folded over itself like a bolt of cloth), braised pork belly slices in soy with mustard and shaved leek, megochi (flathead) tempura, and housemade "handbeaten" soba noodles, greyish white flecked with buckwheat.

新しいものに挑戦する雰囲気

2007-04-17T18:55:00.000-04:00

Through the winding course of Zenpukuji river the grass grows fast and loose, the mud paths are merely suggested at by the contours of previous treadings, benches sit by themselves where they can be alone, the jungle gyms and polycarbonate animals have been washed out by spring rains. This is Suginami park style: the waterway is the thing, a functional drain more than a scenic riverbank. The plants and bushes are an afterthought, sprucing for a concrete and aluminium-railed canal. You pass azalea bushes, magnolias with petals sagging with raindrops, and late-season soumei yoshino cherry trees with bald pistils after their petals have been dashed to the ground. Hobby vegetable plots, fluttering laundry on poles, derelict bicycles propped against the shutters. A children's nursery and toy workshop called Rabbit House nestles next to wooden clapboard houses with disused gardens only carelessly tended.

Asagaya's public housing estate lies just off this canalside green, its common spaces overgrown with bushes and trees in no discernable pattern. Tended to only occasionally since the sixties, maybe. Grass in balding patches, a litter of potted shrubs in clay saucers that collect moss and rainwater. Rainstained and greying concrete with the block numbers traced out in small brown square tiles. And what a lot of light on tile there must be - 木漏れ日, the leaking of light through the trees - in this little pastoral-socialist hideaway.

タイムスリップできる喫茶店

2007-04-01T22:45:00.000-04:00

It was like a walk-in diorama, a stage set from a Dickens novel with mouldering furniture and a forlorn man behind the counter polishing glasses. The bell tinkled lightly, door opening with a creak, a light drizzle, and the wind making the windows shudder. I'd read about it in one of the "mania" Tokyo neighborhood tokushuu's on Suginami ward. One of the few classical music kissaten that refuse to buckle, assiduously polishing its china and porcelain hangings, tending to the chintz decorations and maroon vinyl banquettes. Some of them have become just the sort of distraught hole that caters to pensioners who squander their time watching the crud harden on darkened windows, but Violon is aging with a kind of doomed graciousness. It is nice to know that there are some people who devote their resources to upholding this sort of thing. What does it enshrine exactly? A kind of marooned passion with nowhere to dock, a specific hang-up, obsolete, faintly ridiculous, and because of that fact all the more desperately preserved. I hadn't felt so much of a loaded sense of trespass for a long while. Museums seldom have that power anymore; whereas caves of dusty antiques do. Just as lavishness and polish is oppressive, well-tended age is awesome.

There was one other person in the audience, facing the altar. A collection of flower-bell gramophone horns, vacuum tubes and an orchestral pit of other dated sound equipment. The altar was lined with lace, some pastoral-themed porcelain (country lass, farmer's son with straw hat, capering round an orchard, etc), and a very large and excessive lamp. Grandfather clocks, hanging oil lamps, large chests.

Symbiosis; or Post Bubble Sprouts

2007-02-27T21:43:00.000-05:00

Like most recent art spaces, Kisho Kurokawa's new National Art Center in Tokyo was designed as a place of public encounter, running in tune with a high profile cultural calendar. In its own little pocket in foreigner-friendly Roppongi, the NAC includes sprawling exhibition halls (the largest single museum space in Japan, in fact), a satellite branch of Paul Bocuse's high French cuisine, and an outpost of the heavily curated Tokyo "select" shop Cibone. Cibone typically sells a severely limited range of folktronica, artisanal stationery and other extraneous ingenuities. While the museum primes itself to become the showpiece of the cultural part of Roppongi (whereas the pimps, foreign hostesses and military R&R men can carry on frolicking all night in the seedy part), Kurokawa is moving on to other projects, including running for governor soon. He thinks the current one, Ishihara, is becoming a bit of a menace, clamoring to rearrange the city yet again in preparation for a possible second Tokyo Olympics in 2016.

Our newest public spaces are guilty of this betrayal: they are anything but democratic, frequently under the whim and directive of some ambitious technocrat with generous funding. This new cultural hub has its own exit from Nogizaka station; you are spirited effortlessly through a series of engineered tunnels, following the trail of illuminated signs that ensure you don't get lost or take the wrong exit. The polish is quite oppressive. It's got that whiff of expensive remodeling, the tyranny of a perfect refurbishment.

The new art space is complicit in advertising its own image/imagination. Four years ago, Minoru Mori's mixed-use Roppongi Hills complex (service apartments, modern art museum, international cuisine, lavish boutiques) was outdone only by the audaciousness of its ad campaign. Takashi Murakami got commissioned to design a series of cartoon posters featuring his terminally exuberant "Superflat" critters having a little romp around the playground of their "New Hills Lifestyle!". Kurokawa's NAC is its new accessory. (In about two weeks, though, Mitsui Fudosan, one of Japan's two or three national construction dynasties, is going to launch Tokyo Midtown, a similar development which will overwhelm even Mori's Hills.) Kurokawa and his contemporaries began championing an urban model of organic rogue-like contagion in the sixties, outcroppings of "Metabolic" architecture left to spawn itself throughout the city. Little of that extemporaneous spirit remains, unfortunately. Nowadays what makes the news are large tracts of land for well-funded projects, usually variations on the condominium complex theme, overseen by the singular utopian vision of a master planner.

If we must be crabby about development, let's at least acknowledge that it's been awhile since we've enjoyed so much outwardly benevolent patronage for Art, in the marbled lobbies of investment banks, as showpiece centers for ailing provincial towns. Much of it, however, tends to be programmatic assembly work that feeds off a fantasy narrative of work-and-play downtowns. Real estate brochurespeak for people who enjoy buying (into) packaged identities. Kurokawa used to be known as something of a maverick, junking traditional urban planning for messy, erratic development. Now he's switched to the more orderly model of "symbiosis". Does he mean a harmonious relationship between man and his shelter? In any case, it's quite a different ecology that comes to mind - a model of symbiotic power between corporations, developers, investors, advertising. Quite a world apart from the monstrous metabolic spasms of postwar Tokyo in the throes of rebuilding.

Despite this recent polish, Tokyo is a city that's managed to resist wholesale refurbishment, the look of uniform newness that Singapore loves. It's probably the last city - and certainly the only one in Asia - to have had the benefit of a relatively gradual transition to Western standards of modernity. Having fulfilled all its gleaming infrastructural ambitions forty years ago, Tokyo can now sit back and appraise its forty-year old patina. A good part of it has that dated look from the sixties, lots of concrete and municipal-hall modern. This is its "authentic." Large swathes of cobbled tile and concrete and aluminium in tofu blocks. Corrugated aluminium, polycarbonate screens, battered clapboards and weathered rain-stained cinderblocks. This unplanned jumble of cheap industrial bits and pieces. Littered with unpromising materials, Tokyo screams to be redesigned. Developers are starting with Roppongi. Some architects have been having different ideas, though. Atelier Bow Wow, currently the subject of an exhibition at Gallery Ma, appeals to a "practice of lively space: glocal detached house and micro public space." Bow Wow are a vigilante husband-and-wife team of post-materialist Situationist rogue agents who like firing up the suburbs, sprouting subtle interventions in post-bubble Tokyo.

After the moneyed fever of eighties development died down, clients became more sober and stopped demanding kitschy fiefdoms with Roman capitals and marble verandahs (Singapore unforunately hasn't quite outgrown this). WIth less money and more restraint, clients went in for modestly outfitted and compact boxes in prefabricated materials and plasticky finishes. This is the sort of place that goes unremarked, quietly commissioned by sympathetic clients, nestling anonymously in a sea of huddled one or two storey houses. Post-bubble, this is Tokyo's recessional wabi. Buildings are treated as independent allotments, micromanaged and rearranged as you like.

Back home in Singapore, I wonder when we will have the luxury of distributed development, anything at all, really, to contest the bland official line on global cultural renaissance urban downtown masterplans, etc. We're not alone in this, of course. It seems to be Asia's particular lot to have to face the ruinous effects of compressed modernization. It's difficult to escape the tyranny of regulated development and pre-integrated lifestyles, ambitiously assembled by government advisory boards and developers. The proliferation of chain stores and international franchises. Superbrands have turned most city centers into High Street corporations. We tend to get the cityscape we deserve. If nobody's going to stand firm and insist on more graceful aging and kinder environments, we can look forward to more and more arrogance and invasiveness.

Singapore has generally been on a bit of a tighter schedule than Tokyo. So many things torn down and trashed at one stroke, before they had the time to fray, crumble, crack and peel, in installments. Patina is one of the few things remaining to us that still resists being dematerialized, reduced to an image (I discount here the sort of urban quotidian-pastoral school of photography that fetishizes unkempt alleyways and their rusty pipes and crumbling brickwork). In Singapore, where we threw patina out the window at first and now clamor to get it back now that our surroundings are radiant and our infrastructure is spotless, the cause is even more hopeless. Is there some middle ground between toy-bright Chinatowns and cloistered playground waterfront Integrated Resorts and yachts and condominiums? If we haven't had the time to unfold gracefully, do we have an alternative to one-stroke corporate-funded refurbishment?

What is Singapore's authentic? Its native Gothic? If you disqualify HDB public housing stock, our foreign starchitect showpieces, and cheapened heritage conservation areas...Still, I can think of a couple of examples: SIT first-generation flats in Tiong Bahru or Queenstown, row shophouses in Joo Chiat or Yio Chu Kang, colonial bungalows in Seletar or Tanglin. Last There was a lovely short film that kicked off RESfest in Singapore last summer that knowingly captured our very own Tropicalia. An urban pastoral walk in the park, the film stock colored by heat-fatigue. The sepia tones shimmering with late-afternoon languor. A girl dawdles in a corner of Siglap: the forlorn coffee shop with cruddy windows, the Peranakan matriarch's ancestral terrace house and its garden overtaken by weeds, cycling aimlessly in a stranded carpark. Lots of shifting light on mosaic tile, homages to formica tabletops and melamine tableware.

　　
This is part of our "authentic," although no one with any pretentions to more glamorous stereotypes will care to admit it. At the moment, while everyone's preoccupied with visions of gleaming financial parks and zones of designated leisure, who's going to tend to our more humble hangouts? Already I think some of these "native" inspirations are being mined - look at Dempsey Road and Rochester Park's boondock-colonial backlanes being taken over by wine bars and villas-for-dinner. (The locals are taking back the colonial bungalows, moving back into the deserted plantation and having their own little version of Sunday bridge and tea-on-the-verandah.) In Tokyo there is a long and cherished vein of nostalgia that prizes the messy, meandering alleys of the old downtown (下町、shitamachi) as well as the forty year old shabbiness in areas that somehow escaped Bubble redevelopment. Magazines routinely memorialize derelict public housing compounds, time-warp shopping arcades, and the sort of department stores that we used to have (Tay Buan Guan, Oriental Emporium; fluorescent tubes and squeaky linoleum). It took Tokyo one boom-and-bust cycle to start reappraising itself. When our shiny showpiece New Downtown, plus all the waterfront condominiums and IRs finally get completed, maybe people will finally start catching on to the native Nanyang patina of our more neglected neighborhoods.

Curated cafes

2007-02-19T04:36:00.000-05:00

Remaindered space is a particular Tokyo specialty. In boom-town Kichijoji, fifteen minutes west of Shinjuku, the city center is indistinguishable from any othey busy subcenter in the capital - Isetan, Marui, Tokyu, Kinokuniya, together with their phalanxes of service staff decked out in costumes that make everyone look like PanAm flight attendants from the seventies. What you don't expect in slick Kichijoji-central are the unkempt hideouts that nestle alongside the slick mall developments. Right in front of the north exit is Hamonika Yokochou (ハモニカ横町), a scrambled assortment of fishmongers, shops of mouldering pickles, 4-seater curry houses run by unrepentant "Indo-kei" types, donburi counters, auntie emporiums and "viking" smorgasbord standing cafe-bars. One of them serves "one-coin lunch." I clambered up the steep and clackety staircase without toppling over, sat myself in front of a five-seater bar on top of which a large casserole of niku-jaga and gyu-suji (meat and potatoes; beef tendons) simmered disconsolately. The stools were rickety and capped with red vinyl. For Y500, I got an hors d'oeuvre bento-box of a half crescent of odened daikon, cabbage salad, pickles and groundnuts, and then miso soup and a tuna and leek garlic saute. The lone window was cruddy, plastered over with band flyers, far-flung sake and shochu labels, one-off design exhibition postcards.

This is the scruffy chic that has made Tokyo's name for offhanded and cave-like dining options. But of course, Tokyo is also replete with the other extreme, hard to find so thick on the ground even somewhere like New York or London or Paris. I am talking, of course, about the Curated Cafe. The Curated Cafe is by no means unique in the Tokyo world of mass consumer happiness; there are legions of curated boutiques with historically accurate fetishes displayed like cabinets of curiosities; curated hair salons with vintage turntables that play infuriatingly well-chosen lounge exotica rarities; curated record shops with passionate agendas to push; etc etc. Beams, which celebrated its 30th anniversary recently, began scouring European craft fairs and flea markets, American heartland thrift stores before retro became retro. It probably invented the whole idea of the postmodern international emporium. It's now become something of an integrated empire of enlightened curatorship in art, fashion, music, and craft. It has the look and feel of a proselytizing bazaar, a kind of freemasonry of taste that nonetheless graciously welcomes new initiates who don't have the time to cultivate a personality, and then spend money agonizing over how to best externalize it. It tells you, what awfully mundane tastes you have. Look at your high street chain store threads and mass produced accessories. Come and peruse our precisely selected collections of artisanal wares, drop some cash and walk out a convert to a higher-order post-materialism (emphatically not the same as anti-materialism).

In Kichijoji, the best Curated Cafe I could find was Medewo and Dine, an "interior shop and cafe" in the Tokyu "Ura" backstreet area, but there are doubtless more stringently assembled ones in Daikanyama or Nakameguro. Medewo sells you food, espresso drinks (surprisingly good, actually) but also Freitag bags, graphic prints and Italian coffee equipment and tableware. The floor is unfinished cement, the tables are Formica and the chairs reconstructed from some mix of vinyl, PVC and Bauhaus stainless steel tubes. On the self-service reading shelf there's Classic Cafes, Adrian Maddox's loving monograph to the London formica Italian coffee bar (leatherette, Deco lettering, vitrolite and laminates), Medewo's acknowlegment, planted Nabokov-like on the premises for the astute "reader," of its historical references. This is one of the recombinant ones, taking various pokey inspirations from the sixties and stage-managed for an audience likely too young to fall for a coherent and thematically consistent reconstruction - of which there are plenty: zinc-barred and wicker-chaired French bistros and cafes in Azabu Juban or Daikanyama for example.

There is also, a ten minute walk from the station, A. K. Labo Patisserie, a two storey ivy-wound white clapboard house made out on the inside with beautifully worn dark wood floorboards and half-hearted Eames moulded plywood chairs. It's light and airy and the rotating art exhibitions have the same feeling - unretouched craft-fair sock monkeys, lovingly framed color pencil etchings, kitchen knitwork done by hobbyist housewives. The tarts have filigree filo and perfect crumbiness, the apple one with graceful juliennes, the chocolate Tigre gummy and sponge cakey at the same time. The bookshelf is casually stocked with Paris flea market and antique store guidebooks, LOHAS magazines with pastel photos of cycling in the park, baking quiche and shopping for tsukemono at the obaasan's pickle stall. French radio plays ethnic selections from its outer departements, like Henri Salvador or Guadeloupean beach bar sugarcane shimmy- let's sip curacao easy-listening. It also reports the latest traffic conditions on the Peripherique and counsels you to head on down to the Centre Pompidou for the last day of the Herge bande dessinee retrospective. It's just more pleasantly curated leisure time for the Japanese, but somewhat unnerving for me. If only because I get the niggling feeling that the Japanese do French better than the French do themselves.

City as Museum in Motion: Edo in Tokyo

2007-02-07T20:18:00.000-05:00

The approach is innocuous. It's about a fifteen minute trek down a characterless thoroughfare that cuts straight through Koganei towards Kodaira. Just before you enter by the west entrance, lodged forlornly between the two high speed lanes of a busy intersection, there's the Tama Jousui Nature Walk, a scruffy path strewn with earth and roots, skimming something between a rivulet and a canal choked with water weeds and fallen branches. Then you enter Koganei park and are struck by the generous space, meandering cycle paths, dry patches of parched grass for picnics, the now-defunct locomotive commuter service lovingly erected as a monument behind latched gates. A little further on is a theme park for grownups.

There's a 1920s cosmetics store with a stonewashed facade and ionic columns carved out of its surface, a public bath with kitsch mosaics and original hand-dyed noren (flappy curtain-like drapes at the entrance), a Deco photo studio, Taisho period western homes with heavy oak and mahogany furniture, late Meiji farmhouses with thatched straw roofs, sagging eaves and a simulation brazier.

The Edo Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum treads that treacherous sliver of a line between respectful preservation and joke museumification. It's like Siena or central Paris, afflicted with the brittle charm of intact history. The residents are publicly proud to live in an ancient tenement wearing its stains gracefully, but in secret they will tell you what a terrible drag it is to have to deal with creaky staircases, sagging plaster from the ceiling, the seasonal moulting of the paintwork. Koganei's mini Edo inherits this tradition of the museum city, without the pesky residents who actually live there. The actual preservation of the buildings in situ was passed over at first, and following their demolition, when Japan finally made its peace with reckless development and modernization, decided to exhume its defunct native architecture and reassemble it into a Legoland for posterity. As opposed to Singapore's facade treatment and adaptive reuse, Koganei decided it would not foist modernity on its pre-modern hardware. Little Edo accords history the respect it is believed to deserve. We will break decisively with this crumbling wood stock housing, remove it from the context of our everyday lives, and become curators of a dead tradition of craftmanship.

If preservation is difficult, it is difficult because it is wilful anachronism, against better practical judgment and modern-day expendiency. Architecture has this additional irony - it either becomes its own self-iconic museum, or disappears completely. Unlike most fine art, which bears being stuffed into a temple of modern museum-going culture for the believers, architecture is intensively localized and essentially unmoveable. Once dismantled, it has not much of an elsewhere to hide. Except, of course, in one fell stroke, in this sort of theme park setting, where it testifies to its own demise by archiving itself, in the nowhere and no-context of an "architectural museum". Refurbished with period furniture, tools, the clutter of daily routines, the architectural museum disguises its fradulence by branding itself a "real" simulation, of life as it authentically was back then. Accusations of kitsch are effectively negated, because architecture has no other chance to circulate. It insists that there is no other faithful archive.

The eastern side of the park is intended as a restaging of mercantile Edo, but in fact Meiji machiya (townhouses) and various provision shops, along with early Showa "kanban kenchiku" ("signboard architecture") angular shophouses (not unlike the Malayan Chinatown-colonial sort, with their narrow frontage, two- and three-storey construction, and Art Deco facade treatments) have been thrown into the mix, so that the visitor can straddle time and history more efficiently, saunter through a century of architectural history within the space of a weekend day trip. The archive, despite its sometimes lofty aims, is not incorruptible. Most museums aren't. Even the best and most faithful ones never fully recapture time-in-a-bottle. Most of our supposedly living cities are themselves archives-in-progress, haphazard accumulations of buildings out of phase with each other. If the city had the luxury of languid development (Rome), imperial decree (Nara), fascist renovation (Paris), or some combination of each, the residents count themselves lucky to inherit some of this strictly curated spirit. If, like Tokyo, none of this has survived to accompany it into the modern age, the archive is scrambled but intact. It will take some deciphering. Tokyo's archive has too many collections to be curated effectively. The exhibits come into their own. Some hoary and urban legendlike, others endlessly rebuilt and refurbished according to the fashion of the age, and yet others young upstarts trying to add color and new blood to a "historical" area.

The label "architectural museum" is fraudulent. It refutes the possibility of a living archive of architecture perpetually in variance with itself. It pretends to suggest that cities are in and of themselves incapable of preserving a core of history within a whirlwind of change. It is, at its base, against the proposition of art-as-life and vice versa. The living, user-friendliness of architecture as lifestyle.

Broadway...Bigness for the Masses!

2007-01-30T22:00:00.000-05:00

Metabolism started in Tokyo, roughly contemporaneous with other experimentalists and theoretical urban cell-groups like the mid-sixties Archigram of "plug-in city" fame. The Metabolists rejected orderly town-square intimations of the city as outmoded, badly adapted to the reality of mass housing pressures and dwindling space in downtown areas. In Tokyo, postwar reconstruction and unprecedented urban growth, pre-Olympic infrastructural improvement, plus a newfound consciousness of design and planning issues - Japan hosted the World Design Conference in 1960 - all fed into architects' concern with densification and mass housing issues. Metabolism's heritage was Modernist, but had little patience for pure aesthetic reflections on space, light, and transparency; the self-contained detached Miesian glass box was an indulgence, and even Corbusian public housing was not quite radical enough. Too settled, too single-noted. Perhaps what was needed was a certain Dis-unity of habitation, expanding on the utopian promises of Modernism without too much of its hygienic order. After all, it wasn't everyone who could afford the sun-dappled Corbusian glass grove or the Miesian villa.

Kikutake Kiyonori, especially, was Metabolism's patron architect manqué - he made ambitious proposals for modular capsule structures snaking wildly over existing buildings, towered over residential neighborhoods, prancing like DNA helixes and spiralling out of control - most of which were bluntly rejected by the relevant authorities. Metabolism promised to be ad-hoc and spontaneous, an organic, contagious movement that mirrored runaway economic growth, thronging populations and densities, growing fungus-like to match demand and circumstance. Instead, it ran up against walls of building codes, sunlight ratio and height restrictions, and a scandalized public fresh from the thatched countrysides of Japan. As with other artistic manifestoes, this one flung itself far and wide, gaining favor far from its original intent and context. When head honcho Kurokawa Kishou visited Singapore in the 1960s, marvelling at People's Park Complex, Golden Mile Complex and Paul Rudolph's Concourse, he found himself in the awkwardly pleased position of an originator whose disciples had run away with the scripture and freestyled with it.

Back home in Tokyo, an early pioneer of the warren-like mixed-use Metabolist highrise was the "Broadway" building in Nakano, three stops and five minutes west of Shinjuku. Completed in 1961 by Miyada Keizaburo, it became one of the first suburban destination complexes, with one storey below ground and ten above. Miyada had studied in Washington and been impressed by the shopping malls, apartments and supermarkets of postwar America, and when he returned to Tokyo decided to incorporate these modern comforts into "mansions," a sort of condominium prototype, equipped cells for modern living, never more than a short way away from amenities and "connectors" like public corridors, atria, and plazas for dawdling and gossiping with one's neighbors. Broadway included restaurants, fish markets, clothing stores, rooftop gardens, an outdoor pool and a golf range - reproportioned to fit the scale of the vertical complex-as-city, of course.

Broadway is still possessed of that time-warp charm, marooned in the sixties with its linoleum floors, formica countertops, fluorescent tube lights, and distinctly claustrophobic corridors, bracing eager shoppers with the classic smell of mouldering merchandise. It even has glaring design defects that make it hell to navigate but which everyone's come to love anyway - from the ground level shopping street Sun Plaza you are whisked urgently up to the third floor; and then, as required: up one flight of stairs to the fourth, or down one flight to the second floor. Its tenants, unconsciously or not, have helped to memorialize the era of its conception in their own way by devoting themselves to the sale of vintage goods and pop culture ephemera from that time. Kanransha is a cinephile's poster closet from the swinging sixties (French new wave, Antonioni, Bergman, etc). Mandarake operates a large buyback and trade-in depot in manga ephemera. The weekend mobs are more Kowloon than Omotesando. They throng the basement food halls and huddle in hawker concession booths for greasy takoyaki, "soft cream," barrels overflowing with pungent pickles and dessicated fishes.

Something like how Golden Mile Complex turned - and some would say, degenerated - from a utopian drawing-board scheme into a noisy ethnic supermarket and loitering forum for foreign laborers, Broadway's messiness proves the accidental genius of "Metabolic" development, thriving long and clamorously, far from the blueprint of its original conception. Architects are guilty of this betrayal: they wish only good things for the "civitas" of our public spaces, humane interactions in places we can proudly call "commons," but whose vision of the public is this? Certainly not the public's.

With a vitality beyond any reasonable original expectations, Broadway is a classic exercise in hands-off dirty populism, a living instance of devices left to themselves, left to languish or flourish, as they will. One key difference, though. Because the Japanese practise an exceptionally obsessive gopherism, whatever their chosen consumerist fetish, this is no facile idol worship teen hell mall with posters and stickers and dangly cellphone accessories. It looks only like a barracks of so many cluttered bedrooms of people who stay in and watch too many videos, but you might stumble upon actual theatrical release Antonioni or Godard posters, dead stock tie-in merchandise for C-grade horror flicks like thermos flasks or red clasp-lunchboxes. There's a tiny outlet doing a roaring trade in antique sports watches with an accordingly swish interior (at sharp odds with the makeshift stockpiling of the first-generation nintendo game cartridge museum next door). For an instructive comparison, I recommend a visit to People's Park Complex (Zhen Zhu Fang), a similar complex with quite a different accumulation of objects. This will be the profitable subject of some other article, but in rough terms, it's Japanese curatorship and selectivity on the one hand, and Chinese pirated kitsch on the other.

Showa Modern 昭和モダン

2007-01-27T09:58:00.000-05:00

Although never formally colonized, Japan has always been fertile nesting territory for Western cultural imports. The vogue for youkan (western houses) dates from Meiji, but it was only really during early Showa (1925 onward) that modernist architecture as such began to sink roots. Ever since Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel was completed in 1923, Tokyo has cherished, if not actively fetishized, the industrial gleam of steel and glass, prizing their “negative” values like natural light and void space. Maybe that affinity was mirrored in its own native building traditions: the one storey hiraya, a wooden house constructed from timber joinery and sliding screens; the row house (nagaya) stretching deep into narrow back alleys (rojiura) despite an extremely narrow frontage (supposedly a legacy from feudal times when merchants, for whom this dwelling was principally constructed, were taxed on their property according to the width of this frontage along the main thoroughfare); the tea room, or sukiya, that opens out onto a “verandah” (engawa) overhanging the garden or doma (unfloored part of the house), the site of domestic urban-pastoral happiness, it seems - frothy matcha in tea bowls with Japanese sweets, sunning oneself while playing go, entertaining the house cat, etc.

Foreign architects working in Tokyo found warm reception for their open plan, well-lit interiors; conversely, Japanese repatriate architects returned to plant Parisian arcades and brick buildings all over the city. Wright’s assistant on the Imperial Hotel, the Czech-born Antonin Raymond, enjoys something of a mythic status as a pioneer of rational, angular modernism. In suburban Suginami ward, Raymond’s Tokyo Women’s Christian University nestles next to Zenpukuji park. The church façade is riddled with geometric ventiblocks that resemble a Moorish arabesque, or one of Wright’s Mayan-inspired suburban stone villas in Hollywood or Pasadena.

The record of Japanese product during the same period, however, was patchy. Mainstream Japanese modern before the war was essentially Bauhaus inspired-and-imitated. Apartment blocks were initially meant only for foreigners and Japanese repatriates; it introduced other curious and forward-looking youngsters, mobo and moga (modern boys and girls; essentially the Japanese generational equivalent of London’s Bright Young Things, or Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age dandies) to dosoku seikatsu – literally, life with shoes on. From wood, cinderblocks and rice paper, lounging on cushions and tatami, suddenly Tokyo’s moboga were capering around a living room in brogues and heels, perching on top of Bauhaus pipe chairs and sipping earl grey from English china. The love of “modern” interiors was uncritical and unchallenged, and at first the Japanese didn’t so much import Western architectural expertise as borrow the glamor of its associations. The defining curves and stylized lines of New York Art Deco were props on permanent loan for the living spaces of Asia’s first burgeoning middle class urban consumer society.

European mod cons seemed as if they were flown in direct and retrofitted. After much of wooden- and straw-roofed Tokyo was levelled by the earthquake in 1923, aspiring modernists were given a clean slate to work with. "Kanban kenchiku" (signboard architecture) grafted copper boards, slate or mortar onto flat facades of two-storey shophouses, leaving behind the more traditional joinery and protruding wooden beams (dashigeta) angling downwards from a sloping roof. The armored reinforcements were practical - copper plating was fireproof, and later shielded the building from shrapnel during WWII air raids - but there was always room for ornamentation. Art deco motifs and geometrical patterns were often carved or hammered directly into the copper plates.

From Paris, but with about a forty year time lag, the shopping arcades, or passages, suddenly materialized in central Tokyo. The first indoor arcade appeared in the Maru office building in 1923, in the Marunouchi/Hibiya district, historically faithful down to the mosaic floors, Art Nouveau arches and wrought iron rails and balustrades. This would mark the start of an enduring taste for Reform Club smoking-jacket chic : heavy lampshades, thick wooden panelling and so on. Even today, this sort of gentleman's club atmosphere lingers in the more sullen corners and musty basements of Marunouchi and Ginza, still cherished by retro hounds with a taste for boardroom gravitas.

It would take some time for modernism as such to be fully digested by the New Japanese architecture, though. Maekawa Kunio, together with Sakakura Junzo and Yoshimura Junzo, completed the somewhat textbook-Miesian International Culture House (kokusai bunka kaikan, not to be confused with the late 50s concrete concert and event hall in Ueno park called just bunka kaikan) in Roppongi, which even way back in 1923 already had the stirrings of a foreigner-friendly cosmopolitanism. Late in his career, Maekawa would find the balance that would earn him his reputation as a leading light of the New Japanese Modern, successfully marrying his Bauhaus leanings with traditional “authentic” Japanese traditions. His personal residence (1942), now dismantled and reincarnated in the open-air Edo-Tokyo architectural museum in Koganei city, is essentially a hiraya with more generous proportions and better natural light. It retains the free flow of space from the interior living room outward to the yard of the traditional Japanese residence, with an elegant concession to double-height ceilings, an open plan staircase, and a two-tiered graduated shouji (sliding wooden screen in a grid pattern) - rice-papered at ground level, transparent glass for the upper half. The result is one of those rare instances where Bauhaus box modern and the "New Japanese" fusion rid each component of its limitations. The Japanese house managed to shed its usual gloom, and the modern glass box shed a good deal of its dogma and acquired a newfound warmth of materials. I’ll let the picture speak for itself.

Doujunkai Apaato; and your New Hills Lifestyle!

2007-01-16T21:24:00.000-05:00

In a city known for feverish new development and a generally shinier patina than most, gracefully decaying buildings are something of a Tokyo marvel. The average lifespan of public housing, shuugou juutaku or danchi projects, is 30 years. Especially during the feverish era of postwar rebuilding, entire tracts of faceless "tofu" apartment complexes (豆腐のようなデザインの集合住宅) materialized overnight; in an effort to rehouse maximum numbers of people at minimal cost, they were often in slapdash materials, marred by haphazard workmanship. Walls and floors were thin, uninsulated, prone to leakages and fractures. Subsequently, and usually within that narrow 30-year horizon, upwardly mobile residents got fed up of dealing with the repairs, and simply upped and moved elsewhere, or else tore down and rebuilt in something more "modern," like concrete, tile and aluminium. Because they were provisional structures in the first place, preservation and heritage were never on the cards at all. Those housing blocks that were not part of this mass rehousing scheme, built before the war and spared the blitzing of Tokyo, however, were of a much higher quality. (This was during a time before the rather twee self-branding campaigns began - now danchi are danchi, apartments are (non-public) apartments, "heights" denote a little more luxury, and "mansions" are a guarantee of comprehensive "western" mod cons like dishwashers and (gasp) combination toilet-bathrooms).

In other large metropoles, midcentury architecture, especially of the Corbusian "unities of habitation" variety, has become a motherlode of perfumed ruins, prized as "authentic" historical blank canvases for architects and photographers to install their studios in...Tokyo's the same (and very probably more smitten. In any cool cafe worth its half its pretentions, the magazine rack is sure to have the Casa Brutus "BIG 3 extra issue" featuring all the forgotten and obscure works by Corb, Wright and Mies - including an unbelievably curated architour of Chandigarh). Perhaps this pre-war/post-war rift in quality control has fueled an even greater obsession with the charmingly creaky and paint-peeling walk-up tenements, sometimes with hardly anything else to recommend them except their venerable age. As recently as the Bubble 80s, though, Tokyoites were too busy speculating in French country chateaus and Manhattan penthouses to pay much attention to their own native deadstock of public housing, known collectively as the Doujunkai apartments.

Originally numbering 16 projects in Tokyo and Yokohama built in the late 1920s and early 30s, the sturdy, practical construction in reinforced concrete (fireproof and earthquake-resistant), ample ventilation and natural light made them ideal for dense inner city living. The majority were dismantled in the 80s, and presently only two remain, in the eastern "downtown" (shitamachi) districts of Uenoshita and Minowa. More recently, there have been some sensitive facade treatments and adaptive reuse, however. Daikanyama, a satellite residential district of Shibuya, is something of an ongoing (half-century, and counting...) study in public housing on a human scale. Maki Fumihiko's Hillside Terrace, a sort of proto-Metabolist housing project, used clever partitioning and layering in an attempt to revive the idea of a "commons" in a public housing project. It's hosted unfinished alterations and progressive annexes since the 60s. The Daikanyama Doujunkai was "upgraded" in 2000 to become the more condominiumish Daikanyama Address. All this is somewhat besides the point, if you consider that Daikanyama, together with adjacent Nakameguro and Ebisu, is now part of one of the most gentrified sections of the city, cheek-by-jowl with discreet bars, sidewalk and canal-bank cafes, boutiques and all the rest of it. If the Doujunkai has "survived" in Daikanyama, perhaps it's only as some kind of token communal landmark that can then be safely reworked, helping to bolster land prices and spur on the nostalgia industry...

The other recent metamorphosis is of course Ando's Omotesando Hills, a studiously unconventional shopping mall that recalls the graceful curves of the New York Guggenheim; sure, it's about shopping and rabid consumerism, but at least Ando tries to disguise those ugly motives with his trademark artisanal concrete, sloping walkways and sensitive skylighting. The former Aoyama Doujunkai survives as the "gallery wing" of the complex, home to a number of art galleries, that shows off the open plan stairwells and simple frontal balconies to best effect. Behind all this apparently sensitive redevelopment, however, is the sinister master vision of one Mori Minoru, who has in the past decade or so syndicated his network of "Hills": a sort of 21st century urban template of Bigness (I wonder what Koolhaas would have to say about this) for a scattershot Tokyo, a city he sees as languishing in the face of competition from Shanghai, Bangkok and Singapore. His diagnosis isn't incorrect, but the prospect of his network of Hills, each one a vertically-integrated playground of curated leisure for moneyed internationals, strikes me as a Ballardian nightmare of super-rich gated communes. Already he has five major Hills in place; the first, Atago Green Hills, was completed in 2001, and Omotesando Hills opened to sharply-dressed mobs only last year. He stumbled a little over Roppongi Hills, because of the number of people he had to buy out and resettle, but the trend seems unlikely to abate. Tokyo "Midtown", another live-work-play megaplex, is scheduled to sprout in the same neighborhood in a couple years. Like some kind of global superstructure plastered onto the lowrise Tokyo landscape, Mori's Hills would be appalling even in Singapore or Shanghai, but they are especially depressing in Tokyo, a city I trusted would be mature enough to fend off the grandiose urban ideals of some meddlesome technocrat.

Showa Retro and Chuo Line Charm

2007-01-11T21:20:00.000-05:00

Much of Tokyo came of age (and has since been fairly stranded) in the postwar years of capital-rebuilding. While Americans basked in their suburban deckchairs amid the hissing of summer lawns, one ear tuned to the TV jingles celebrating Hoover vacuums, Miracle Whip, FireKing dishwasher-safe glassware and frozen fish fingers, 1950s Tokyo staggered to get back on its feet. People queued at all hours for foreign provisions at the Ame Yokochou in Ueno, cheap public housing projects (danchi) were erected. In the runup to the 1964 Olympics, Tokyo paved and bulldozed its way to the staggeringly well-connected train, subway and tram network that now riddles the city, raised ambitious Metabolist cellular housing projects like Kurosawa Kishou's Nakagin Capsule Tower, invested in some seriously elegant modernist concrete that has since patinized beautifully. The Olympic park in Komazawa is a radiant example of Showa regeneration-era concrete (although elsewhere, more modest budgets might have urged the cheaper and more wabi cinderblocks...) It's less a park and more a sort of triumphalist playground, left over from a time when Tokyo was convinced that it was going to catch up with the west at last. Ueno park is another mature showpiece of Showa modernism in richly hued concrete, with both Corbusier's Museum of Western Art and Maekawa Kunio's Bunka Kaikan.

Tokyo has been drifting westward throughout Showa, with the result that much of the Chuo line (a suburban commuter rail system running west from Shinjuku toward major Tama area cities like Kokubunji, Tachikawa and Hachioji) is now celebrated as a largely intact timewarp commune of public housing, crusty public baths on their last dregs, mid-century western-styled luxury geshuku (lodging houses) with mantelpieces and other aristo trappings [the one on the right, "Seikou Lodging" nestles in residential Ogikubo and survives as a JR ryoukan], coffee shops, "western sweet parlors," and jazz bars of the first generation, at a time when chintz, vinyl chairs and floral antimacassars were still in fashion (of course, in some circles they still are. A lot of period deadstock interior trophies and vintage mid-century "classics" have somehow pooled and accumulated in this city). For the dedicated student of urban textures, this is ground zero for Showa retro. Tokyo has no "New Yorker" that I know of, but a magazine similarly named, called "Tokyo Jin," is telling in its differences; no high-profile verbal portrait of cultural celebrities or postcolonialish short fiction with yet another minoritarian take on exile and dishabitation. Tokyo Jin is a local interest paper that interviews cafeteria operators and night wardens, runs features on derelict public housing danchi projects in obscure greying neighborhoods, lovingly photographs instances of pokey bars owned by wiry-haired women with seven cats and a large collection of snow globes. The key difference of course is that this is a "local" paper for a megalopolis of thirty million people. One issue might feature the "magic of the Chuo line," but will also run a story on the classic "western" (youshoku) cafeterias in Ginza or Marunouchi that specialize in beef stew or mixed fry (and charge prices commensurate with the accumulated weight of their historical glamor), plus an article on a much-loved local community center cafeteria-cum-soup kitchen in Chiba. Reading it, one feels the overwhelming heartlandership of the reporting, a housewifish concern for the little details and harmonious neighborly relations, the importance of shopping local, the evils of globalism and development, and so on.

As hippies and various communards fled central Tokyo in the 60's, they slunk progressively further west on the chuo line; first to Nakano, then to Koenji (manga artists, vintage used goods warehouses and Tokyo's most packed outdoor summer dance festival), then to Asagaya, which still enjoys something of a reputation for literary types. Nakano now has approximately the electric atmosphere that Shinjuku did in the 60s when people in tweed blazers packed "live houses," smoke Gauloises and drank whisky in a room only slightly larger than a closet. Nakano is also famous for the shopping center "Broadway" with all mod cons of the modernist mixed use complex, finished in cheap formica and linoleum; harshly-lit and warren-like with that classic smell of mouldering merchandise. Golden Mile or People's Park Complex; maybe one of the period Kowloon teen-malls too. It specializes in pop culture and especially manga ephemera, and operates a large buyback and trade-in depot. Again, because the Japanese practise an exceptionally obsessive gopherism, whatever their chosen consumerist fetish, this is no facile J-pop idol worship teen hell mall with posters and stickers and dangly cellphone accessories. It looks only like a barracks of so many cluttered bedrooms of people who stay in and watch too many videos, but you might stumble upon actual theatrical release Antonioni or Godard posters, dead stock tie-in merchandise for C-grade horror flicks like thermos flasks or red clasp-lunchboxes. There's a tiny outlet doing a roaring trade in antique sports watches with an accordingly swish interior (at sharp odds with the makeshift stockpiling of the first-generation nintendo game cartridge museum next door). As I walked past a small video arcade lovingly restocked with coin-op machines from the glorious eighties, I saw a Street Fighter machine and succumbed fully and completely.

Next in the series: Japanese magazines, "select shops," and the tyranny of curatorship

東京：都会文化のローハス系

2007-01-10T01:52:00.000-05:00

t's not even late autumn, although it's already december. depending on where you look (and inokashira park near kichijoji (ji2 xiang2 si4) is a very good place to start), the leaves are only somewhat blushing. it was a very urbanpastoral stroll in the park the other day as i sauntered down a gently sloping hill, passing boutiques called "comme ca du mode" or "cafe renoir", flowering shrubs and potted plants spilling onto narrow streets, the light magical, soft and brilliant as it only is at year's-end, past an ancient "lao3 pu3" yakitori shack (called tachi-kui, "standing-to-scarf" is my translation), i broach the entrance to the park. plenty of old people, impeccably dressed and wrapped in voluminous scarves just to feed the ducks or walk a dog (or three). it's textbook urbanpastoral, and i'm floored. there are rangers standing (or rather, cycling) around, but one doesn't feel surveilled. it's perfectly regulated, gently modulated to the sound of plashing water. there are even announcements and tinkling jingles to beseech you to enjoy nature, pick up after your dog, and be a responsible citizen in general. it would be a little more grating assuming i understood more japanese. as it is, i feel it's only slightly well-meant in the way a grand-aunt's exhortations to eat your vegetables can be.

today, the "other" japan. but still, urbanpastoral...? it's ando's new omotesando hills complex. again, i almost weep in shame when i think that we got a trashy third-hand castoff Toyo Ito prototype, badly finished, in VivoCity...but Tokyo gets this beautiful shrine to consumption, whose somewhat base commercial motives are ever so delicately glossed over and disguised by the wabi-sabi concrete and "natural" fissureship that is an Ando trademark...The walkways in the mall slope gently up and down, breaking the quadrilateral box-layout without sacrificing a certain compactness of scale. You thankfully wouldn't get lost here. The Dojunkai wing is a nice refurbishment and conservation of pre-WWII Japanese public housing. I'm not sure if Ando applied his concrete over and above the exisiting facade. gorgeous in any case, and a much better juxtaposition of old and new than say...Cathay cineplex...?

1369

2006-08-26T22:32:00.000-04:00

a woman comes in. she is slouching, almost tottering, wiry hair in a
frizzy bloom, and carries a wrinkled hemp carrier bag. her slacks are
slackening and look like purple spandex. she casts a doubtful eye on
the lumpy-looking "croissants" and enormous cookies sealed away in the
refrigerated vitrine, barely dodges a sleekly coiffured blonde
marching towards the door with a carton of six pre-sugared-and-creamed
coffee cups of scalding plastic, and fairly tumbles onto a chair by
the table just next to the counter overlaid with recycled napkins,
Equal, and soy creamer. lucy tells me that the cafe loonies only come
in the mornings, during which she has had to smile sweetly at, but
finally fend off lonely but extremely garrulous war veterans, assorted
pierced goth-dykes, and social anthropology PhD students with freitag
messenger bags, powerbooks and teflon-coated fleeces. i only ever
come after lunch at which point the place fills up with more earnest
types toying with their hefty textbooks on clinical psychiatry, or
tort law, or feline veterinary science. but here she is, rummaging now
in her hemp bag for a book, looking certifiably odd but perhaps not
quite distinctly so, not by cambridge standards. this town is many
things; richly funded capital of the academic universe, preserve of
patrician glamor, crusty nest of lapsed hippies, extended-lease
enclosure for aging academics to stick around, graze on the outlying
pastures of their former farmstead, and then fade away.

the girl who makes the coffee hollers sweetly but spiritedly. "double
iced soy yerba wheatgrass latte for here?" what difference does it
make, one thinks, since one always gets a paper cup, whether it's to
go or for here. irregardless.

outside there are some plastic chairs and tables in dark green acetate
with their attachable and extensible umbrellas unattached. the al
fresco assembly tends to be almost exclusively slinky
dissertation-toting 20-something females pecking away at their
analyses of deleuzian film theory, or stubbly misemployed men in
slacks, straggly outerwear (even in summer), misshapen cloth-based
headgear, with leery gazes aimed at nobody in particular.

send mail to: my new pad, cambridge, MA 02139

2006-05-31T19:50:00.000-04:00

the first dwindling glimmer of dusk, late spring, inspiring humidity, central square 4th floor walkup, cambridge, MA 02139. the common room is still a wasteland, but my room is now tolerable, except that the wooden floorboards have exceptionally generous fissures that collect debris as soon as you mop/sweep/vacuum across it. after squatting and wiping for two hours and finding about $0.63 in spare change in assorted crevices, i inaugurate the kitchen (generous northern exposure) with roasted pumpkin and eggplant, pork sausage, romaine and parsley salad with figs and garlic, toasted ciabatta, and a salvaged almost-full bottle of shiraz. the nifty thing about sublets being that usually one chances upon and is given permission to pounce on the stragglers-on, a half consumed tin of swedish lumpfish caviar, a quarter-stump of lap cheong, a tupperware of petrified gnocchi and disintegrated pesto.

yesterday, my first actual first-hand baudrillardian excursion into suburban connecticut, en route to steve's house in the "armpit" of that state, we stop for lunch midafternoon in 85F heat and step gratefully into the shaded postmodern glade of a gutted gas station now turned into sino-american chow-outpost. the usual color scheme of red and green, imperialist furnishings, rosewood gloss and all the rest of it. owing to mounting cholesterol, steve can only permit himself one deepfried chicken wing, but i try even the crab rangoon and promptly feel the beginnings of a rumble in my aorta. i try explaning that cantonese food is not in fact all fried, in fact, i tell steve, it is meant to be the most equilibrated of foods, authentically differentiated, light, even bland, depending on your native palate. we fight a losing battle in this country trying to convince americans that chinese food is not exclusively the "authentic" immigrant experience of slapdash permutational cuisine (the sort where the chef prepares four meats - and one tofu - seven vegetables and eight sauces, and systematically generates a menu based on the combinations therein) - but rather, a distinguished one of only three high cuisines. as an analogical exercise it would be enriching to argue for the relative culinary-national lownesses on the other end of the scale.

we also make a pitstop at mohegan sun, a gleaming spire of a casino-resort-mall-hotel complex, towering like shards of blue glass along the thames river. the indian chiefs that occupied the reservation on which it now stands entered into a pact with a south african casino developer on the understanding that the cultural integrity and local context would be preserved. the committed modernist, i was expecting...well, what one normally expects of these things, and i was pleasantly surprised. not just the finely wrought infrastructural junkspace that one only comes to expect in asia, and in singapore and hongkong specifically, but the various "ethnic" symbolisms were no cheap patina, but rather elaborate colored glass and tasseled woodwork and fractured mosaic and rich italian marble. i begin to think if i in fact would not mind visiting las vegas. maybe it's that i'm afraid of seeing in it, and settling in nicely into, what is essentially the same design-by-fiat ordered wonderland that is singapore.

??????????

2005-12-22T20:02:00.001-05:00

Winter break in Cambridge. After the student exodus homewards for great feasting and general laziness, who's left? Mostly stranded internationals and sullen graduate students. I biked to Toscanini's for coffee and some lolling about with a crisp treatise on Tel Quel for what will probably be a painful term paper, then S calls and it's off to Cafe Baraka for lunch. Hurtling down Mass Ave. towards Central Square without a helmet, I remember an article in Dig about this being the best place in the Boston area to get "doored" - have someone open a car door right in front of you as you bike past. The loud Tunisian woman in the gown is not around. By day Baraka is a real treat of sun-flooded cushioned comfort on upholstered banquettes, and you really get to see the riotous color of the various throws and hangings and lampshades. Potted plants on paint-frayed windowsills. There's a real nice Merguez on flatbread with a cress-tahini salad and rather limp frites doused with harissa. And of course the rosewater lemonade at the bottom of which S notices a suspiciously glutinous deposit of what seems like pollen- flecked phlegm.

Several hours later, after a quick grocery pitstop at Kotobukiya, I set off the fire alarm with the runaway fumes from my searing monkfish. I calmly extinguish the heating coil, make sure the monkfish is safely to one side to cool before throwing on my coat and leaping downstairs to wait for the Cambridge Fire Dept. Who, when they arrive, are politely greeted by an apologetic Asian kid who sheepishly directs them to the culprit kitchen. Whereupon he wonders if he would have to explain the weird groceries lain astrew the table. He's left in peace to tend to the monkfish.

So, there is tobiko spaghetti tossed with the monkfish, garlic, shiso, nori, and?????topped with radish sprouts and toasted walnuts. And some of that Korean yuzu tea.

??????????

2005-12-22T20:02:00.000-05:00

So, there is tobiko spaghetti tossed with the monkfish, garlic, shiso, nori, and?????topped with radish sprouts and toasted walnuts. And some of that Korean yuzu tea.

Sunday brunch

2005-11-20T23:30:00.000-05:00

At the edge of the backyard frontier between Cambridge and Somerville, the lush leaf-fall swept up against pavements, there's one of those faintly sullen, dowdily-decorated Chinese restaurants. We are served bitter, rank tea in small cups; the reedy synth cycles pop melodies over a square, drowsy beat. Early winter afternoon sunlight through a waterstained window. There are photos of socialist high-rises and back alleys festooned with damp laundry from some smog-choked third-rate urban dump. Faded casts of concrete and stained plaster. We have some doughy pork dumplings waddling in a pool of vinegar and chilli oil, a plate of chive pie, sliced pork belly with braised salted cabbage, scalded eggplants in red sauce laced with garlic. In the corner there is a shelf with stacks of cheap, crinkled paper napkins, forks with unwashed dishwater crud-stains, small jars with spouts for black vinegar. The tablecloth is convincingly beginning to fray.

Republic of Cambridge

2005-10-01T21:22:00.000-04:00

It's been two weeks since I got back to The Republic of Cambridge, the Kremlin on the Charles, the leafy suburbia that also happens to be something of an academic nexus for the entire world.
I just got myself a bike, so that I can finally negotiate the prettier suburbs of this fine city more easily. More specifically, this means I can zip off to read at Darwin's or Mariposa or Dado, and then to Bread and Circus, then over to Blodgett for a swim, and then off again to the Film Archive, all without having to pretend to be a flaneur (which, frankly, is ridiculous in America).

It's true that the radical Cambridge of the 60s has largely disappeared, but this is not nearly as surprising as the fact that some of it has actually survived. Last weekend, I stood on Mass Ave in Central Square, surrounded variously by hipsters, teddy boys, goths, punks, techies, biz school students in khakis, academics in tweed, academics in hoodies, B-boys in hoodies, flannel suited old men, old black ladies in frocks. Juliana Hatfield took the main stage, but there was also salsa, bluegrass, techno, a free jazz trio, a big band with horn section, a purple suited black soul ensemble. People shopped for potted bonsai, Tibetan trinkets, Chinese massages, screenprinted Ts. They were eating Cuban pulled pork, southern fried chicken, saag paneer, pad thai. The World Fair, they called it. And quite a world it was, except there was something about the setting that let me down. It's continually amazing to me how and why Cambridge supports this diversity. In what is supposed to be its heart, Central Square, sure you'll find wonderful ethnic restaurants (and not just of the halfheartedly aligned sort, of ambiguous inspiration - nothing trendy and Manhattanite like Pan-Asian or Peruvian-Japanese: instead you'll find Ethiopian, French-Tunisian, Sichuan, Bengali), specialty bookstores and all the rest of it. This is a district of rich ingredients but poor textures...the layout of this "square" is uncentered, slapdash and suburban. But maybe that's what Cambridge is; the point about it is that it is unpromisingly sparse (but why would we expect it to prove the exception to the lazy, sundry sprawl of American auto-towns?) and identifiably post-urban. Like some kind of post-millenial cultural fallout, here you will find a jumble of peoples and cultures, not conspicuously housed and ordered, certainly not very self-promoting, coexisting somewhat uneasily, wedged into this strip of gas stations, Korean tea bars, greasy spoon diners, Irish pubs, Buddhist centers, Scandinavian furniture showrooms, home furnishing chainstores. This might not be anyone's vaunted vision of a global city, but Cambridge is global, in a sense. It's the vaguely depressing spectacle of the terminal point of American society.

Paris, picture postcard

2005-09-13T12:20:00.000-04:00

The charming Parisian street corner cafe. Endlessly imitated and replicated. By New Yorkers who want their very own croissants and macaroons in the Upper East Side. By Tokyo trendoids, who mix guileless admiration and an equally naive disregard for context by lovingly and uncannily recreating, cracked-mosaic tile by cracked-mosaic tile, a hyper-authentic cafe in anally accurate detail that overlooks an artificial concrete-filled and zelkova-lined canal. The Parisian cafe is an inexhaustible fund of kitsch. The sad truth about it nowadays, however, is that the endless plundering of this particular icon of modern culture has led to, by natural selection and the continuous refinement of key ingredients (good coffee, bustle of human traffic, social space, privacy in public), a triumph for its conscientious students who have far outstripped the original. Weaned on the modern franchised equivalents, the visitor to Paris in search of centers of cafe culture is likely to be disappointed. The dull gleam of those iconic sidewalk tables and the dowdy wicker chairs in green and yellow weave could do with some freshening up. The service is a little too curt, the waiters too surly, the peeling paint pushing the limits of charm and tending towards a queasy sense of decay. And, hey, when was the last time they scrubbed down those smudgy window panes?

The truth is, not only is the search-and-rescue of these authentic cafe specimens often a fruitless and stubborn quest, but also evidence of unthinking worship of a pretty outdated archetype - one that means little except when consumed in situ . More progressive cafes in cities that like them that way are souped-up hyper-cafes, social spaces enhanced with wondrous organic set lunches on the menu, free WiFi, design and architecture mags, fair-trade sustainable-labor low-calorie caffeine-free wheatgrass-boosted beverages for a demanding audience. They are your lifestyle nodes, connectivity platforms, environmental rights watchdogs, ambient music retreats.

What Paris cafes (in Paris) offer you is rather feeble in comparison - the rights to a fraying aesthetic integrity that rings increasingly hollow (Paris invented style, but no longer has the patent on it), the distant consolations of history and myth, a romance that requires the absolute complicity of the devoted Francophile for the experience to hold together...What Paris offers you additionally however is the freedom from images. By which I mean not postcard museum-city images but rather the pop metropolis imagery of the postmodern sort that makes our cafes look like Scandinavian furniture showrooms, or contemporary art galleries, or fashion boutiques, those kinds of mixed-use multi-functional spaces of conscientious design. Paris, especially when understood in the context of the other three that make up the Big Four, represents anti-design, or at least a resistance to re-design. This isn't to say that Pop hasn't made any headway in Paris, of course, but for the most part historical context and faithfulness to itself and its past weighs too heavy in the balance for much re-engineering of this city's image of itself to take place. To look at Paris is not to look for aesthetic aspiration or innovation, but rather for aesthetic independence. Paris gives you the master copy from which a million copies emerged, and one feels uneasy when confronted by this; unelaborated, unenhanced, referencing nothing but itself. You might not be used to the relative simplicity of this primitive order of signification; here is a hermetic, non-hybrid city of self-completion and pedigree. Paris, the lone modernist pitstop in an inter-urban network of cross-reference?

Be with me, my beloved love, that my smile may never fade.

2005-09-12T11:47:00.000-04:00

Some of the plucky criticism hurled by my friends at Eric Khoo's third feature, Be With Me:

"I have a thing against disability movies."

"The piano soundtrack is so feeble - just like in a Taiwanese serial."

"What are they subtitling?"

After the lurid nightlife and housing-project anomie, suicide, prostitutes, necrophilia, an abiding obsession with social misfitism in general, I thought it was nice to have a wholesome story for a change. Eric seems to have momentarily given up the custodianship of his social outcasts and other unsavories; here are characters who are not only not socially stunted or alienated, they convert alienation into charity, longing, desire - and the glimmering prospect of possible fulfillment. Leaving your characters to wallow in their isolation, self-inflicted or not, is easy. Too many directors treat their fashionably depressed muses as canvases of misery; the storyline and dialogue become ripe for pathetic fallacy; incidental glimpses of big cities are excuses for "urban dislocation". Whereas enacting self-healing or reconciliation onscreen is a choice and demands a suspension of style, of aesthetic detachment and the smirk of irony - in other words, an unflinching sincerity that I think simply requires a higher level of craft.

It's tricky work, though - here, in a quasi-documentary chronicle of a real woman with a disability, you have to avoid the additional pitfall of looking like an omnibus episode of Extraordinary People. What might seem like technical clumsiness of Eric's part, I think, is something of a transcription of Theresa's personal plight - the "slow" pacing as we observe her daily rituals of cooking, teaching, typing, all carried out with a labored grace. Duration and process is palpably tracked - this is her duration and process, of course, not ours, and we might be inclined to dismiss it impatiently.

The teenage puppy love and security guard threads are unfortunately insufficiently developed and occasionally mar the tone of the film, but if they bear watching alongside Theresa's story, it is thanks to their lightness of touch. Mee Pok Man and 12 Storeys had characters that circled fruitlessly within the confines of an endemic situation. While Be With Me's minor characters still yearn - and perhaps still fruitlessly - they are crucially now no longer unconsoled. There is questing, desire unrequited or unfulfilled perhaps, but nonetheless a redeeming movement, an emotional investment that rescues them. There is the work of reconciliation and empathy: love letters, memoirs, translation; all of which suggest that Eric is moving on from important work about social divisions in Singapore to the more onerous task of reflecting on social integration, healing divides and starting rehabilitation.

Paris, the Shanghai of the West

2005-09-09T08:45:00.000-04:00

As the hype piled up about Shanghai being the Manhattan of the East, the quintessential 21st century city; while Singaporeans flock there in droves to "tap the market"; while every third kid at one of the tonier American colleges is mugging Chinese characters, I decided that I would hole myself up in the has-been citadel of culture of a crumbling Europe, the museum-city a century past its prime - Paris.

One of my Chinese professors told me that when she went to grad school in Chinese back in the 80s, it looked like she was taking the nobler route, immersing herself in the dusty heritage of an ancient civilisation then suffering the fallout of a failed exercise in radical social reform; whereas her East Asian Studies contemporaries studying Japanese were seen as dirty businessmen looking to "engage" Japan and thereby get their grubby hands on a prime piece of Bubble Tokyo. Now the situation is the exact opposite, of course: students of China now all look like the investor-opportunist sort who can't wait to sink the roots of their shiny new skyscraper HQ in Pudong, whereas Japanese scholars are silently imbibing the culture, in spite of grim economics, as Tokyo goes the way of a moribund West Europe.

So while devoted Francophiles will bemoan the passing of some mythic Jazz Age Paris, or American Expat Paris, or Cubist Surrealist Paris; while Paris falls out of favor because it looks increasingly dowdy (especially in relation to a Cool-Britannia London), shouldn't it be that it gains in cultural cred because it's stagnating? You certainly don't go to do business in Paris; you couldn't care less how the Bourse is doing! If you go to Paris, it has to be because you want to drink in that delicious cocktail of decay; to recover the "authentic"; where crass commerce counts for less, and witty banter more; where life is distilled into an espresso cup, written in the crumbs that fall from your crusty baguette. To go to Paris when it is no longer fashionable, to visit a great city when it is slightly out of phase - that's when the air is heavier with myth and memory. This is just an extension of that adage about the pleasures of anticipation, the disappointment of fulfillment, and, finally, the further pleasures of reminiscence. To walk Paris in 2005 is something like time travel armed with a stack of postcards or old photographs: where have these images gone? And why do you cling to them more resolutely - "no, no, this is the real Paris" - when you have a completely different city in front of you?

With all that talk about global cities nowadays, four favorites always seem to make the list: New York, London, Paris, Tokyo. You know how they write it up in style magazines or couture articles or architecture journals: "this swanky new watering hole in downtown Guangzhou could make you believe you were in St. Germain," "taking a cue from hip London gastropubs, this newcomer to the Chiang Mai dining scene..." It's a magic invocation, to even look like you've borrowed a signature aesthetic or intangible spirit from the Big Four. Of the four, though, I don't think Tokyo deserves to be there - if only because the "global" bit is problematic. If we're talking about expat numbers or accessibility to foreigners, Hong Kong or even Singapore might be a better choice. And that's only if we force ourselves to pick an Asian candidate. LA's diversity outshines any Asian city, ditto San Francisco, although it's more a global village than a global city. New York and London are probably unshakeable choices. And then there's Paris. First of all, I think it definitely helps to be a declining colonial force. As the messy processes of post-colonialism kick in, suddenly there's this huge influx of subjects from your former possessions; people you once enslaved and subjugated return with a vengeance, intent on filling jobs you no longer want to do yourself, flooding your markets with cheaper goods that they made themselves, perhaps. There you go, instant diversity, a London full of Indians, Kenyans, Jamaicans. Paris overrun by Vietnamese, Algerians and Senegalese. Everywhere you turn there's a curry house, or a sheesha bar, or a banh mi counter.

There seem to be different models of globalism-in-the-city, though. My sense is that if in New York you are a third-generation Shanghainese immigrant whose grandparents came in the 50s, that is your identity. Let's look at the Chinatowns, I think their situation reflects this. In Manhattan it's that downtown warrened mess around Spring St et al; in London it's that two-street-thoroughfare plus several alleys (really small, this one) just off of Covent Garden and Theatreland. But it's in Paris where you'll find the leafiest, airiest, most pleasant Chinatown of all - although it really is more of an Overseas Chinese Town - but more on that later. Paris in fact has not one but two (and some would say three) Chinatowns. The biggest one is in the 13eme, a roughly fifteen-minute walk south of the Latin Quarter, a vague triangle shape bound by the Avenues de Choisy and d'Italie, and in the south by Boulevard Massena. Despite the signs changing language once you cross Place d'Italie, there is not much of a sense of an otherplace. In Manhattan once you hit Chinatown the streets are suddenly grittier, there's more trash lying about, the smells are invasive. In Paris you saunter along wide tree-lined boulevards. The architecture, too, is striking. Instead of the low-slung and closely packed shophouse-like layout you find in New York and London, le quartier chinois in Paris is a series of brutalist concrete housing projects interwoven with the usual five or six storey apartment blocks; but there are also sizeable tracts of individual houses, and some landscaped condominiums. It seems like some of the Parisian knack for human scale and gentleness has rubbed off on the 13eme. This Chinatown has been Pari-sized, generously expanded to Paris proportions - which means wider thoroughfares, more sauntering and loitering space. And this is pretty much my tenuous point, that in some way or another, even after a possibly longer history of immigration, the Chinese diaspora in New York and London still seem to inhabit the margins of the city, or at least a slightly grimier share of it; whereas Paris seems to have allowed the Chinese more space to develop, so that finally they become not just strangers in permanent transit, but normalized Parisians who also happen to be ethnically Chinese. And by extension, while the usual case is for these Chinatowners to identify precisely with this marginal state, to carve out a mini-state within the city, Paris's 13eme seems to "remember old Shanghai better than Shanghai itself," to recreate more convincingly and less violently the image of a faraway Asia, a bettered and more harmonized vision (whose truth value is however questionable) of all that cheaply romanticized Eastern glamor sold to the West by Wong Kar-Wai movies or Shanghainese cigarette poster pin-up girls. The 13eme seems to simultaneously evoke an erstwhile Shanghai and a present-day Paris; it is a foreign elsewhere as well as an elsewhen. And, in addition to all that, maybe it's also just Paris.

This is the bigotry I am trying to defeat

2005-09-08T23:53:00.000-04:00

On my very first attempt at throwing a dinner party, everything was more or less a disaster. It was basically a meal of stiff salad, dry meat, thin sauce. But all this was enlivened by some twee touches: frozen cherry tomatoes, a green mayonnaise, blue curacao "cocktails". I also tried to cram as many colorful "elements" as possible onto the same plate. Next to the few forlorn slices of overcooked steak I forced in some blushing tomatoes, gangly asparagus, drunk mushrooms (literally: they had been left to drown in a huadiao jiu marinade). Then I wisened up, and decided that no, you didn't have to have laundry list assemblages on a plate to make a good dinner. The embarrassing variety went from micro to macro, intraplate to interplate. This actually leads to more craziness: you're forced to compose with more balance. Herbs cannot repeat themselves; there must be meat and seafood; main actors and a supporting cast; starches and salads, and so on. Last summer I tried to produce a banquet and ended up with a tapas buffet, where I had been forced to commit the ingredient-tautology crime by putting lots of rocket, basil and pinenuts in everything.

We learn. As A said, "your spreads have gained focus." Last night there was a roasted cauliflower soup with manchego cheese shavings that managed to stump everyone. Popular guesses were lentil, mushroom, lotus root, turnip, but first prize (for truth value) went to J's "that braised Tientsin cabbage with Jinhua ham and dried scallop dish". I was flattered (but not as much as the cauliflower was), because that's quite a lot of flavor to come through from what was really just some vegetable pulp. Everyone seems to think cauliflower is the poorer and less glamorous cousin to broccoli, but I think that's just because it's quite hard to fuck up broccoli - just blanching or steaming or stir-frying and it usually emerges in an edible state - whereas it really takes some inspired tweaking to wring any sort of credibility out of a cauliflower. It also has that anaemic color and stodgy image which are hard to dispel. Actually, that's not really true across the board. The French have a very high regard for cauliflower; ditto for artichoke and white asparagus. They definitely have a very different champion vegetable league table from, say, the Americans or the Chinese. That's key, I think: the French usually have elaborate vegetable preparations (discounting their salads). Just like some of their specialties - tete de porc, boeuf bourguignon - that rely on laborious mise en place to achieve culinary transubstantiation, lots of French veggies have their own fairy tale in which the humblest root gets to dress up in cream-and-butter finery so that it can sit respectably next to the all-star meats - leg of lamb, calves' liver. After roasting, cauliflower becomes the Cinderella to her evil broccoli stepsister: a rich and melting gold mixture that makes great soups and other preparations requiring a soft core (maybe a gratin, or fritters).

There was also a snowpea, feta, pinenut and mint salad, lamb sausages and roasted sweet potatoes with caramelized shallots and coriander, a spaghetti aglio olio tossed with shitakes, saucisson sec and lots of garlic and parsley. And for dessert, a...I'm not sure what to call it. It started life as a "warm flourless orange and ginger cake" but after a minor catastrophe in the oven, I was forced to exhume the whole lot and repave the road, so to speak. Kind of a rough job, some improvised masonry, but it turned out ok. Of course it looked nothing like a cake. A shepherd's pie, maybe, or a crumble, or an orange brownie. Topped with the gelato that A kindly brought along from Ricciotti, it was something of a personal triumph for me, and a good save, this being my second ever attempt at baking.

Thanks to everyone who came. Now I'm off to scarf up the leftovers.

Star City Sydney

2005-09-08T00:30:00.000-04:00

Last month I was in Sydney for five days with my family. Family holidays used to be high-octane roadtrips in New Zealand, catamaran adventures in Pattaya, castle and manor-trekking in England. Nowadays the parents aren't in such hardy shape anymore, so we're rarely able to tear ourselves away from the cities. Last year our daily itinerary in Japan read something like: 9am wake up, 10am breakfast in hotel, 11am step out of hotel for a walk, 12 noon lunch, 2pm parents and brother head back to hotel in taxi for afternoon nap, leaving me to amble through hours and hours of synthetic concrete Tokyo glamor until about 7pm when we'd arrange to meet somewhere for more food. The experienced has never thinned so far, though, at least for me. If anything, it's made me more of a flaneur than ever. Every new city throws me a challenge I rarely decline - to suss out the soul of the place, to divine its "thereness", how its people, buildings, transport arrange themselves. Usually, this involves quite a bit of fanciful extrapolation of my fragmentary impressions, but of course that's precisely the point. The flaneur's amateur anthropology is never meant to be a measure of the new city, but merely the measure of his city in relief, chalked up against a matrix of all the ones he's ever visited. Spending a semester in Paris this year taught me more about Singapore than Paris; every arrondissement that grew familiar to me, as I walked its streets daily and committed their pattern to memory, was a liminal mental map in magic tracing paper which, viewed against the light, turns out actually to be just another ititeration of a blueprint for Singapore.

We stayed at the Star City hotel, which in fact is just the "housing" element in a monstrous mixed-use complex that includes casino, international cuisine, two theaters, and quite a bit of shopping. In other words, the nightmarish sort of Integrated Resort that will soon materialize on these shores. As with all corporate commercial developments, it's terribly difficult to make these things look good. They sprawl this way and that, you're obliged to stuff some peripheral retail into the mix so that "trapped" consumers might throw a little bit more of their money away on a neck massage or a chocolate selection. There's never any sense of human scale; corporateness wants you to feel the awesome moniedness of their operation, and so they go in for double, triple-height ceilings coated in sparkly acetates, or maybe those low-cost high-gloss laminates in weird color schemes like turquoise and ochre. The flooring is usually some odd tint of marble, the railings and balusters usually mismatched and in burlesque styles. In keeping with themes, there might be a large Roman centurion statue somewhere. I'm not sure what effect all this has on the average (Asian) destination tourist. I suppose it's all rather impressive and "grand" in a facile sort of way, or maybe it all really doesn't matter. This is just the window dressing, the characterless Junkspace that has to be there, passageways of transit that connect casino to restaurant to toilet, so who gives a fuck about what it actually looks like.

The casino itself is a fascinating cross-section of most of Southeast and subtropical Asia, although there are some Koreans and Mainland Chinese as well. In an inner-city suburb of one of the finest harbor cities in the world, a culture of sunshine and slacker surfdom, here we find the clearing-house of the game-mad holidaying Asians of the world (usually wearing those soft sun-hats, even indoors).

We may have something going, actually. People who doubt the soundness of building a casino here in Singapore, like me, think we know what will really pull the tourists, but maybe we don't. "We" think the perfect holiday is going truffle-hunting in Emilia-Romagna, skiing at Courchevel, trawling the shabby chic restaurants and dive bars of the Lower East Side, but I'll bet the bigspenders who really make up the tourist figures want nothing more than precisely this sort of low-exertion, protected, culturally synthetic experience. It's only the liberally-educated poncy people like you and me, who think too much about these things, formulating elaborate leftist critiques of median tourism and poshly theorizing about it, that really think we'll get anywhere with this Renaissance Arty City tosh.

Unities of Habitation

2005-09-06T08:56:00.000-04:00

In search of some stuff I needed for Thursday's dinner party, I hopped on the NEL to Little India. Thought Y might've been working at spell#7 but she wasn't, so I had the better part of the afternoon alone to ramble around the place. I'd heard a little about Tekka Market from enthusiastic family (the thosai?), and in the full midday heat the place was swarming with hungry workers on lunch break. I guess given the location, there was an expectedly higher proportion of Indian food stalls, including a bryani "specialist" with a snaking queue, a couple sarabat stalls where it looked like they still tarik the teh (most drink stalls nowadays seem to pass teh-si off as tarik, foamless and headless at the top). The wet market side held the biggest surprise - I think this guy was featured in the thickass ST National Day supplement. A couple stalls away and already you sense something is amiss. The stall with the kaffir limes and curry powder packets is playing a pulsating Hindi dance track, but what's that other refrain floating up above the mix...a clarinet's insistent singing, buoyed along by a driving double bass, frenetic manouche guitars...that sweet sound of dixieland and hot jazz is coming from just around the corner, from Chia's Vegetable Supply. In a wet market devoted chiefly to the spices and herbs of South Asia, here is a man who will sell you tarragon and sorrel. I think. I didn't get a close enough look, but I assume that's the market he's aiming to corner.

On the other side of Serangoon Road is Tekka Mall, a vaguely oval-shaped and largely untenanted place. It's pleasantly light-flooded, thanks to the skylight that stretches across the entire ceiling. Nothing much of interest, except that the basement has a strangely extemporized feel to it, businesses that look like they've just moved in, a little nervously, aware that this isn't exactly a point of peak human traffic, and have that half-hearted moved-in look because they are prepared to move right out again if business doesn't pick up - which it quite probably won't. There's a money changer in an uncommonly well-polished booth, a couple of forlorn snack stands, and one of those Japanese-inspired S$10 barber kiosks. It put me in mind of one of the most exhilarating things about densely constructed Asian metropoles - their sometimes slapdash layout. It could be vegetables sold straight out of parked lorries in Bangkok, or fake Rolexes spread out on the pavement in Taipei. If there isn't enough proper space to set up your little shop, snatch a little parcel underneath the stairwell, on a rooftop, in the slender hollows between walls, wherever. If this is programmed space, say, those perpetually unstable few square metres next to the entrance to the Gallery Hotel (I've seen champagne boutique and florist), then maybe the compactness makes your stuff look sleeker and more sharply editorialized (and therefore more tasteful). If not - if you find yourself having to hawk your wares at the perilous junction of an escalator and a cliff, then you get a free dramatic backdrop for your retail environment.

The best example of this, I think, is the entire thrilling extent of the most dramatically sited piece of urban architecture I've ever seen - the long and winding outdoor escalator in Hong Kong that links Central to the Mid-levels (already the name implies dynamic contours, the drama of ascent and descent). The escalator only goes in one direction at any time, of course. In the mornings, if you're seated (as I was) at a Central tsa tsan teng (breakfasting on a floppy fried egg, some greasy ham and a bun slathered slick with butter, all washed down with milky tea) with a good view, you get to savor the slightly alarming spectacle of office workers commuting to work on foot, whisked breezily along as the escalator rolls relentlessly downwards, from the heady heights of soaring condo blocks perched on the Mid-levels all the way down to the banks and office buildings of Central HK. After the morning rush hour the escalator runs upward. As a tourist in HK, this has to be one of the most heart-stopping things to do (that only rarely gets a guidebook rec) - taking the escalator upwards from Central - preferably at night, when sodium streetlights supply deepened contrast, and HK's neon heraldry is ablaze. It's pretty much a regular escalator, moving along at the normal speed (the reason why watching the morning escalator commute is vaguely exciting is because the commuters do the work of walking downstairs while also being expedited by the descending current). The awesome thing about it is that you get to be shuttled up above the thrumming activity of Central, surveying gradients and greenery, slowly weaving in and out of the sometimes treacherously perched citiness of HK. The vistas are straight out of Blade Runner, except that they have the additional drama of dizzy heights and staggered placement. In this bit of the city, buildings sprout up not so much where it is most propitious, but (almost) rather where it is least feasible. The Mid-levels may not be the most densely crammed part of HK - rather scattered compared to cheek-by-jostling-jowl Mongkok, for instance - but the mix is electric as well as aesthetic. Instead of the user's-choice pleasures of selecting a desultory itinerary through Parisian street warrens, here you are offered a glimpse at how buildings, and thereby cities, choose themselves: how they wind down the path of their own construction, how an urban organism battles the terrain for the ownership of it. An all-night convenience store balances itself at the edge of a makeshift park; the park that is forced to retreat from an encroaching hairpin bend in the road; the road that is impressed upon by the Italian cafe and its outdoor tables and chairs teetering over the pavement... Everywhere along the escalator's trajectory there are adhoc vendors and hawkers secreted in the interstices, shops and restaurants whose occupation seems tenuous. The skinny buildings they inhabit creep up against the suave curve of the escalator scaffold, press up tightly to a grassy cliff face.

Or else, in Tokyo, where residual spaces are daily annexed to outcroppings of retail space, a ramen bar that seats four people or a one-chair barber kiosk...oops, a bit of a lengthy digression, this. My point - that untenanted space holds promise for a yet unconfirmed commercial use, but that even a seemingly saturated environment is ripe for further exploitation. Maybe what we need is for entrepreneurs to behave like parasites, or toadstools after the rain. Fleeting, modular architecture, nearly weightless and eminently transplantable. A city of flux, of inhabitation and disappearance.

After finding what I needed at Phoon Huat (171 Bencoolen), I headed for Rochor Center, where R told me I could find a thrift store (except I don't think this is an American thrift store, and certainly not in the hipster sort of way) that sold those standard-issue touchtone Telecoms telephones that everyone had at home in the 80s. This was my second attempt, and again I couldn't find it. I did find several fo jiao wen wu xuan though, selling large chrome-plated gold ingots, figurines in the likeness of that long white-bearded dude with the gnarled staff, variously shaped musical fountains (can plug in, one!). Also a mom-and-pop CD-VCD-DVD shop playing an assortment of Hokkien evergreens, and a couple of artisan workshops. There was an old man squatting on a stool handpainting couplets onto a chestnut-shaped ribbed red lantern, and an unmanned, shuttered shop with two unfinished guzheng propped up against its entrance. There was a kopitiam too of course, a huge furniture showroom, and a toyshop of the old-fashioned sort (five stones, marbles, kuti-kuti), a bank, post office, household miscellany... Walking this nearly self-sufficient complex, this machine for living , I thought of Le Corbusier and his unrealized vision for la ville radieuse. When he made his audacious proposal in the 1930s for a tabula rasa Paris, for its serpentine streets, tiny ruelles and allées to be bulldozed in order to make way for multi-laned highways, flyovers, concrete apartment buildings, glass and steel skyscrapers, Parisians were naturally outraged (except...hadn't they just been outraged at least twice in 50 years, first by Haussmann's designs and then the Eiffel Tower?) Here in Singapore, of course, there was no time for outrage, not when the SIT and then the HDB confidently pressed forward with plans for modern high-rise housing for a burgeoning modern population anxious to appear modern. What Le Corb proposed and had rejected in Paris, the city mapped as an efficient function, got realized to some extent in the Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles, a "machine for living" extended to an entire apartment complex interwoven with shops, services, social space. What Rochor Center seems to me is an application of these principles that seems to work. You might not agree with the facile color scheme of the four HDB blocks that sit above the four-storey terrace of shops and services (red, blue, green, yellow), but the mechanisms of Corb's machine are evident: anonymous cell-like residential units with easy access to essential amenities in one neat package. Well-oiled, too: residents milling about running errands, chatting in passageways, shopping, working. And today, squinting in the afternoon sun, I had to admit that even the colors had a garish postmodern rightness to them. Maybe this is what we need - to take Rochor Center as our modular SimCity building block, extend it as much as possible, propagate these machines for living. Or, in a clunky translation from the French, these unities of habitation.

To Liang Court

2005-09-04T11:14:00.000-04:00

Nowadays Clarke Quay is starting to look more and more like one of those other iconic waterside/warehouse urban renewal projects: Faneuil Hall in Boston, Xintiandi in Shanghai, Cockle Bay/King St. Wharf in Sydney. The rules of the game are quite simple, and widely applicable - take a single, couple or entire contingent of sullen outmoded buildings that once saw life as granaries, warehouses, shipyards, gut them of redundant fixtures (but making sure you retain any crucially "authentic" structural details that give the lie to its ex-identity, its industrial ghost), slap on coats of paint, perhaps a complementary extension annex in cool steel and glinting glass so that some interesting past-future dialectic gets going...and suddenly these dead spaces get turned into festival markets, cavernous dance clubs, dramatically spacious restaurants. They botched the job the first time around, though: the old Clarke Quay was a tacky series of souvenir stands, shops selling sparkly knick-knacks, pewter figurines and colored crystals, that sort of thing. Now, not only do we have a restaurant mix taking wide liberties with various cuisines - an Indochine venture channeling Vietnamese-Cambodian but with an obvious Tang dynasty terracotta-fixture fetish ("Forbidden City"), a fashionably borderless pan/South-Asian/Pacific rim bistro called Coriander Leaf - but there is also that free-falling theme-park ride which looks like a bungee harness or a giant slingshot; and those droopy sunflower riverside dining pavilions (if anything, I think this says "fuck the shophouses" and hurtles recklessly forward Tokyo-style for retro-futuristic contextless plastic architecture...).

Not so long ago, though, before this post-industrial infatuation with freshening up the godowns and derelict shophouses hit us, before light industry became perfumed ruins, Clarke Quay was basically just a vaguely functional dock with our own little Tokyo compressed into a neat mall package: Liang Court (and the adjoining Hotel New Otani). Liang Court is now being redeveloped by CapitalLand, which means that we can all expect another sparkling white-tiled and highly polished mall soon stocked with Bread Talk and Food Junction, maybe a satellite Crystal Jade outpost, with or without a new regional inspiration... In the basement, Meidi-ya and its spillover operations (Pokka Gelato, tonkatsu specialty restaurant, Four Leaves bakery) still draw the weekend Japanese expats in search of prepacked bentos and forty-five dollar punnets of Kyoho grapes. The anchor tenant, Daimaru, is now sadly reduced to a bargain basement crockery and houseware section. A mammoth electronics superstore now sprawls over most of the ground floor, casting the deathly pallor of its sodium display lights across onto the mall floors - which, previously a marbled chocolate-calico, have now been retiled in scintillant white. What I hope doesn't disappear: the bubble lifts that spirit the ambling consumer up to the now deathly quiet second, third, fourth floors, occupied by ailing rosewood furniture, clunky chinoiserie galleries, pallid watercolor scrolls, lonely lighting fixtures; as a kid I remember taking the lift up from the basement carpark with family in tow to Tung Lok for dim sum lunch (this before the islandwide invasion of Crystal Jade). The return journey on the lift down to the carpark was always the more thrilling one; surveying the milling crowd of shoppers below, the little tummy-whoop of vertigo as the bubble plummeted down its cabled track, the ground rushing upward to meet you. There was also Trader Vic's, a "Polynesian" restaurant where you ate out of hollowed coconuts and settings made out of woven leaves. You could dine very well there, on festive appetizer platters piled with samosas, spring rolls and other things you might believe are South Sea specialties just because there are maraschino cherry halves and pineapple rings interwoven with the frozen dim sum selection...but there were also roasted meat skewers and goopy fruit relishes and smoky grilled fish, and it was of course a bonus if you bought their act, played along with the tribal village theme, sipping a turquoise Tiki-tiki cocktail, nibbling on macadamias, borne aloft to a cloudless night on the beach by magical marimba and bongo beats...Nowadays of course we are all a lot more sensible about the dining out thing, and decide that we want to eat in light and airy surroundings. Instead of earnest theme restaurants selling you a Pacific island holiday fantasia of synthetic straw huts and swaying plastic trees, we achieve an equivalent transport just by fantasising about wonderlands of Danish chairs and lampshades in witty materials.

To Jenny

2005-09-03T23:02:00.000-04:00

One may have noticed a recent trend towards light, fuss-free cuisine, as promoted by some of the more popular cookery shows. With an emphasis on friendly can-do dishes using widespread ingredients, it seems the new buzzword phrase circulating in foodie circles is "simply delicious"!

According to many fast-paced executives, pressed themselves to climb a corporate ladder, the trend for them is to become disllusioned with the fine-dining scene. They now prefer to spend more me-time on weekday evenings with spouse and children by dashing home after work in the car, just in time to whip up a one-man (or woman) culinary storm in a home-based domestic type setting, surrounded by captivated loved ones. However, they also wish to transplant the professional styles of cooking into a more user-friendly mindset, so that the whole family unit can joyously savour restaurant classics while still cosily attired in the comfort of their casual home clothes.

Yet, the sticklers to restaurant cookery may react violently with shame and horror to so daring a suggestion. "No," they offendedly exclaim, and then add, that the home kitchen should not be invaded thus by trendy movers and shakers from the restaurant realm. They seem to be right. The humble domestic kitchen is certainly no place for a truffled turkey! Home cooking and restaurant cuisine are definitely mutually at odds with the other, and no cultured foodies worth their salt would dare to dream of mixing the two. As it is, however, the situation is a positive nightmare!

"I have several ladies of leisure coming to me for home kitchen tips," says Madam Victoria Sng-Wallace, a retired cookery consultant, 57. "Nowadays, everyone wants to spice up their repertoire of dishes preparable at home. Ladies like to introduce labour-intensive foods like Peranakan sambals into the home arena, but they don't wish to undertake the aches and pains caused by squatting there and pounding - two typical actions that the preparation of rempahs require."

But there seem to be more ironies to the situation. The opposite dilemma is common in professional kitchens, where chefs find that they are no longer called upon to conceptualise elaborate pleasures of the table (let's say, in the late 90's grand French style). In the current dining climate, diners tend to have a minimalist dining frame of mind, thinking that it is trendy to dine lightly rather than heavily. Whereas, ten or perhaps even fifteen years ago, a typical epicure might have eaten in true splendour, zooming straight in onto the plumper cuts of meat on the menu, doused in a liberal overpouring of cream-based sauce, today's jet-set considers this vulgar - and also fairly unhealthy. Instead, dishes like poached fishes with organic vegetal accompaniments or fruity accents are the current fashionable rage.

2003-06-25T15:31:00.000-04:00

Aids to paper-writing:
1. Burdick's dark chocolate bar
2. Hawthorn hamburgers
3. Honey-dijon Kettle Chips
4. Orange-peach-mango juice

Dining destinations:
1. Salut
2. Bologna
3. Pontini
4. Nadaman
5. Hu Cui
6. Paolo e Judie
7. CJLMXLB
8. Spizza
9. Club Chinois
10. Tamade
11. Sushi Jyo
12. Cedele Depot
13. Silk Road
14. Baker's Inn
15. L'Angelus
16. Buko Nero
17. Mezza9 at HALF PRICE

I am out of touch; recommendations welcome.

2003-05-12T14:30:00.000-04:00

May 11, 2003. A, Y and I at Cambridge Common, laying out our ten-year plan.

(upon further reflection, the following has been further revised)

In 2013, at 32, after having spent a couple of years after graduation at fun jobs, freelancing, travel writing, self-dissipation in NYC, Paris, Lyon, Hong Kong, Tokyo maybe, teaching English in Beijing or Shanghai, mingling with similarly desultory people, I will:

-be recently married
-have no children
-be living in a sleek apartment near Robertson Quay (but not G's one with the voyeur's-wet-dream swimming pool), next to favorite restaurants but hopefully still uncolonized by riffraff, still safe from the spoiledness of Boat and Clarke Quays
-be driving that Volkswagen convertible
-stay far far from silly country clubs and their golfish clientele
-have my top secret business plan starting to pay off
-write for a large number of international publications
-have started my own international publication
-photograph professionally
-be starting to feel otiose and, shall we say, improperly applied, and will get a proper, normal and boring job

2003-05-11T12:49:00.000-04:00

Right, time to stop eating all this junk, these adulterated foreign appropriations of real Chinese, Thai, Japanese food, and start accumulating gustatory libido, for a triumphant orgasm come June. AF mentioned a new Paolo e Judie satellite. AE has promised to take me to his secret hawker-food hangouts. J claims his cousin's rogan josh is "brilliant," though I would take issue with applying that adjective to food.

In Tokyo I will retrace the steps of my youth, when I looked like "a Slam Dunk protagonist," when I went pinecone-picking, when I had a horde of Japanese action figurines (a red falconheaded, yellow lionheaded, blue dolphinheaded, a huge turquoise whale that opened up to become a stronghold, literally armed to the teeth, a portly metal Doraemon with a cavernous abdomen, a stomach-niche, flipping open to reveal hidden prizes, surprises), when I visited post-industrial theme parks (Robert Venturi: "Tokyo is the exemplary city of our time...valid chaos, not minimalist order") -- derelict junkyards of construction vehicles for children to climb on and into, when I visited wonderlands of fish and vegetable markets (yeah, this stuff needs to be hammered into you formatively), when I briefly fancied myself a sumo-wrestler, when I lived in a house of architectural éclat (featured in a coffee-table book that we found on a shelf as part of the incumbent furnishings)...

I will track down the two teachers I still remember, although what are the odds that they will still be marooned at an elementary school after 15 years?

2003-04-25T14:15:00.000-04:00

So, this is the logical consummation of my vacillating obsession with Chinese pop: passing off Jay Chou as "the arts of Southeast Asia" at SEA night, ordinarily a display of cute pre-colonial romantic ritual and rural charm. Instead, we have two girls in Singapore Girl tops and jeans, plus an aloof act-cool Jay Chou lookalike. Heheh. How Singaporean is this playlist: Sun Yanzi, Chen Xiaodong, Jay Chou, David Tao, Ella Fitzgerald, and Lam Yishan.

From the program, my mischievously drivelly-blurb-subverting blurb:

Singapore is, strictly speaking, culturally rootless, extending its tentacles to appropriate any number of foreign influences, giving rise
to an almost exclusively derivative youth culture. We have no ethnic or national music per se, patriotic anthems excluded. How many times have students been forced to endure "cultural" performances, wistful mother-country legacies which a nation of pop-culture adulators has now largely abandoned? These songs, therefore, are Singaporean in the way that Dance Dance Revolution, instead of noh theater, is 'Japanese', or karaoke, instead of wushu, is 'Chinese'. These are songs by Taiwanese pop poster-boys and Cantopop queens. Not your typical sappy love songs, though. Mandarin can accommodate lots of maudlin imagery and trite metaphors before it merits being called sappy. (That's why we've decided not to give translations of the lyrics). Asian languages get away with things like that.

Hen Hao (Very Good)
originally by our very own Singaporean Stephanie Sun Yan Zi
It would be pointless to attempt to describe this song in English. Briefly, and literally, love is compared to the steadfastness and
constancy of a fortress. Less a love song than a pledge to solidarity and mutual support.

Hui Dao Guo Qu (Return to the Past)
originally by Taiwanese pop poster-boy, Jay Zhou Jie Lun: "ni diao bu diao?"
This song is a misty-eyed look at lost innocence, simpler times, the dizzy pre-sexual bliss of puppy love. The original MTV featured a courtship conducted via SMS, atop a Vespa, aloof bad-boy posturing on Jay's part, and super act-cutesiness by the girl.

Goodbye (Goodbye)
originally by Daniel Chen Xiao Dong aka "Dongdong"
A guy and a girl at an alfresco cafe. They're sharing earphones. She smiles sweetly. He bids her farewell (do they break up? Is
he moving to Mongolia? It's not clear).

2003-04-15T18:21:00.000-04:00

It's 83 degrees out, breaking the previous record of 82 on this same date back in 1896. And instead of frolicking in the sunshine I'm indoors playing Rockman 3, SMB3 and Final Fantasy 1. Yes, 1. All part of a conscientious second-childhood kickback program to counteract a quarter-life crisis. I want to be at home, loitering in Junkspace, in shopping centers brimming with thrilling tedium and commercial conformity, shuttling effortlessly between the high luster of Wallpaper venues (go look at the photospread in this month's issue, with the octopus-shaped fountain in Marina Square) and the lost-world vernacularism of the neighborhoods. I'm glamorizing, of course (one stupefied by reminiscence can hardly act otherwise). But this time I am well and truly homesick, beyond reasonable degrees. By which I mean that I am not to be consoled if I had weekly shipment of belacan, fried shallots, pineapple tarts, chwee kueh. Nor even if more close friends were here. Barring the weather (but really, how can one exclude the one persistently annoying, and hence cloyingly integral, aspect of Singapore from any wish list?), I want it all. Anal restrictions, parochial neuroses, material fixations, churning contradictions, I absolve you all. You are my sustaining tensions, my inveterate specters, my relished bugbears.

Montreal was not just about food. I saw a Miles Davis documentary, a heart-shaped card of a Zauberflöte, Morvern Callar, Habla con Ella, Herzog and de Meuron at the CCA, Gillian Wearing and James Casebere at the MAC, Gauguin and Matisse at the MBA.

2003-04-10T19:14:00.000-04:00

OK sorry sorry.

Boris Bistro, of the fabled duck and caribou pie, with the sort of menu that you could order from everyday. In other words, a select stable of fond favorites, respectable and pragmatic, none of those magical flourishes and somersaulting accents. So. Venison sausages with frites. Duck confit with frites. Steak tartare with frites. Steak with frites. Moules-frites. Frites. (appetizer portion)

Now I know that doesn't look terribly varied. Aha, but the frites were absolutely fantastic. I could have eaten a truckload, and then have the truck drive another load back to Cambridge. They crackled with perfection, with the lingering whiff of earthy goodness on their parched skins, with the grizzled branchiness of their proportions (svelte but having the assuring solidity of a farming implement). I had a fricassée of wild mushrooms of thrilling woodiness, and also competently grilled swordfish.

We returned, of course, and I had more frites, while A had a risotto of such fabulous dimensions that I considered having it for my dessert. Rough-hewn duck slivers, more magic mushrooms, judicious sage, in a moist mixture which oozed cream, wine, fat.

Le dimanche matin, nous sommes allés à un restaurant qui a été décrit dans mon guide de cuisine comme "une perle très très rare." Il va de soi que nous avons dû l'essayer. La plupart de la foule était plutôt vieille. Les vieux languissaient dans leurs chaises au milieu d'un journée d'hiver, en sirotant leurs cafés, en regardant tout le monde passait par la fenêtre. Quelle paressse.

Notre serveuse semblait d'abord un petit peu muette et sourde, mais enfin elle s'est reveillé et nous a servi. J'ai commandé un plat de nombreuses choses - un petit pot de rillettes, quelques tranches de fromage et de rosette de Lyon. Mon copain a eu une grosse crêpe farcie aux champignons et épinards. La serveuse ineffectuelle a failli oublier le baguette et la marmalade à l'ananas de la maison, mais je l'ai rappelé. Cela en valait la peine.

Quand l'on se sent le besoin de varier la langue pour s'exprimer, c'est parce qu'il est las, et il a beaucoup de travail à faire. Une rédaction de dix pages, en fait.

Tandis que j'écris, je mange du chocolat très merveilleux que j'ai acheté de Montréal. Il contient du poivre rose. Un mélange des choses incompatibles, tu dis? Mais tu as tort. Un peu épicé, le poivre fournit d'excitation!

2003-03-12T16:29:00.000-05:00

I'm getting that strange shiver again. Where once I thought I was just lapsing into sappy sentimentality (all those Chen Xiao Dong concerts), I now know this isn't a phase. Not even one I purposefully and conscientiously segue into just to confuse people. Not another "no shit" stunt. I'm not going to try to define it. I'll describe around it. "It" (strange shiver) consists in:

1. Particularly arch, or tender, inflections in both statuesque AND flabby bubblegum ballads. Faye Wong would come under the former, Jay Chou the latter.

2. Nondescript slice-of-life scene from B-grade Chinese movie, and more so if it's about the heady impetuousness of dissolute youth, juvenile delinquency, bleary-eyed wasted people in squalid tenements, urban sprawl and lurid commercialism, related topics.
(this one is especially insidious. There's no way of telling exactly what sorts of things trigger it. Though I've given pretty extensive guidelines)

3. Compelling slice-of-life scene from A-grade Chinese movie
(Suzhou He, Hua Yan [Dazzling]: look out for my review in "Cinematic" when it gets published...if at all. Anyone want to take up an ad? Will reach 6400 undergrads on campus, plus penetrate self-satisfied artistic coteries.)

4. Dowdy decor in American Chinese restaurants

* * *
So thanks to A's contagious cyber-voyeurism, I randomly google people once in a while (and only once in a while), and last night I thought of this guy I met back in Sec 3. And I found his journal. And I pored over it, with alarmingly close attention to detail, and Oh My God I realised I was (passé composé) like him, and I talked (passé composé) like him, and I wrote (passé composé) like him once. Except of course, now I'm me, and he's still him. I had that most discomposing of existential experiences. Not discovering that there is no self, but that there are neurotic multiple selves, spatially or temporally summated (oops, let a SB44: Vision And Brain term slip in there). And I saw an erstwhile self sallying blithely forth down wide open spaces; whereas in my case, that version of Me was somehow twiddled with at a critical cleft somewhere down the line, now unravelling differently in a parallel life. And the two lives (selves? substitution instances of the same self?) have diverged. And The Road Not Taken, and all that stuff.

H would have something to say about this, about Groups One and Three and all that. And as much as I fear Y's uncanny clairvoyance, I'd be interested to hear his take on this.

2003-03-09T13:50:00.000-05:00

1. Leng3 Pan2 constituency: Crabmeat-shark's fin omelette
2. Mum's albumen omelette with Hunan ham, dong1 gu1, dried scallop and coriander
3. YQ's famously botched sOOper-salty whitebait and three-mushroom omelette

From these precursors I drew inspiration and crafted the most triumphant dish of the night: albumen omelette with dong1 gu1, gingko nuts and scallops, wreathed with coriander garlands.

Y and A made a huge cauldron of fearsomely hot curry. In this forceful Eastwest meld, we also had M's penne with shrimp (and longbeans?), K's mysterious rice pilaf (orange peel, basil, lemongrass?), T's moules marinières, someone's strange calamari-jalapeño thing, C's chic-ku-teh, P's buffalo and teriyaki wings. Then we played Polar Bear, Guru and Robot.

I found canned mangosteens, orange-flavored natadecoco, and natadecoco in mango juice. And A found canned tapas! Octopus bites in garlic oil.

Let's see, what else have I done. Ah, the Master's Tea at Adams. Oh, that stupefying crab dip! Those cuddly scallops enwraptured by floppy bacon bands! Strawberries cling-coated with molten chocolate!

I will attend to the following soon, but not now, owing to a very pressing essay, fun reading (Kundera), hard-ass reading (Saint-Exupéry) and just fucking impossible reading (Sekuler and Blake, "Perception," 3rd ed.)
1. On why Taiwan Café is spatially and psychologically comforting first, and stomach-satisfying only second.
2. On why Spice sucks, and Smile rocks.

2003-02-26T23:00:00.000-05:00

I just got a feedback-function. Feel free to scrawl and scribble at will all over my property. At last, you may fire back at me, when previously you could only "let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter you unrebuked."

2003-02-19T23:34:00.000-05:00

Got myself a shiny new guitar (nylon stringed with cutaway and pickup) today. And went to learn Xing Qing and Hui Dao Guo Qu right away. What I really want to play though is Joe Pass' slinkily nuanced chords, next to Ella's aged mellow throttle of a voice. I've lost the magic touch. My fingers stumble, stubbily, curl and contort only if I harrass them hard enough. Still got the ear for aberrant chords, though.

How many Chinese pop songs use this progression? C, G/B, Am7, G or C/G, F or Fmaj7, C/E, Dm7, G(sus4)? A lot. To name three: Hong Dou, Liu Xing Shen Ling Yu, Hui Dao Guo Qu.

2003-02-18T12:53:00.000-05:00

OK so in the fifteen minutes I have before I go to the Design School to be finally reimbursed for Sonsie (my impoverished ex-editress, it turns out, couldn't quite extract the necessary funds from the business department, and so has to pay me back herself), I'm going to pay H a belated tribute to his exceptional hospitality and culinary savoir-faire throughout my London excursion.

Belgo, a Belgian refectory with industrial chic, where I had moules-frites, a far, far cry from the real stuff. Not quite half as slippery enough, and starting to show signs of congealing into that most tragic of seafood-related catastrophes: turgid shellfish. Busaba Eathai, another comradely community (incidentally, did you know that "tong2 zhi4" is slang for gay partner in Chinese?), where I tackled a large HILLOCK of green curry fried rice. And that lemongrass ginger pressé! We badly need more soft drinks like that, and none of those rubbishy radioactive day-glo liquids with names like Radical Raspberry and Bodacious Blueberry. Khan's, which I'll pass over because H doesn't believe set menus offer a fair representation of the chef's prowess. Paul's tarte au citron which was good, but this being London, there was (probably delusionally) something missing, and was waaay too expensive.

Isola, a huge glorified basement of a restaurant where I had a spectacular salad: tomato, basil, red onion, broad beans, croutons, garlic, olive oil. And then THE best pizza I've ever had, and austerely topped with only rucola and parmesan. Then that same day a free (unpaid for) dinner at Strada, where I was bowled over by THE second-best pizza I've ever had, bubbling over with buffalo mozzarella magma, salami, artichokes and rocket. And (oh God will the ecstasy ever end) a stunning dessert of stunning simplicity: affogato, an iced vanilla nougat iceberg dribbled over with a shot of Illy espresso, to be savored (but quickly) while it melts away right there in the bowl. Food always tastes better when there isn't enough of it...and especially when you have to stave off competitors. I had to fend off a ravenous C - subtly of course.

The Duck Place was notable only for its duck, but such duck it was! Thickly stratified with wobbly ribbons of fat. Apparently it's not roast duck, but deep-fried, or it's roasted and THEN deep-fried, I forget which.

Mandarin Kitchen had proper zui4 ji1 and their signature lobster keong-chong sang mein was excellent.

That's about it; if I've omitted anything you feel was undeservedly left out, lemme know H, and we'll work something out.

[How do you pronounce Kristin Kreuk? Kr-UHH-k, de la façon francaise? Kr-OY-k, like in German? Kr-OO-k? Kr-EEYOO-k?]

2003-02-13T00:15:00.000-05:00

More respite from Annenberg: Grilled sandwich from Hi-Rise with wingspans of Portobello, the festering reek of Gorgonzola, bacon, onions.

2003-02-07T14:18:00.000-05:00

I'm sitting in front of my computer, looking out of the window at the flurry of furry white clusters and wisps sweeping across the sky (Nabokov has it best: "slow scintillant downcome"), while Ella and Louis croon "Stars Fell On Alabama". And for a moment, I picture a cosmic conflagration, an astral armageddon, celestial bodies ablaze and plummeting to earth, a flaming landscape, people being pummelled by asteroids, pyroclasts and other projectiles...

(Happiness is this, she thought)

I'm having the same stuff for lunch. The baguette has self-petrified. B thinks I may have mono (what is that, anyway?), but I can't be bothered to trudge to UHS in this divine weather.

The record stops. I put on A's Rhapsody in Blue, which makes a fitting soundtrack to snowfall. I must be imagining this, but the tempo of the snow flurries seems to fluctuate, stately and temperate during the sotto voce piano cadenzas, feral and frenetic during the full-orchestra reprises. Branches periodically collapse under the weight of deposited snow, creating a powder bloom in the air, and then this too flutters down to the ground in a shower.

Ah, I know, Debussy would make the perfect soundscape for snow. Now, what can I eat to fit in with the theme? Oeufs à la neige?

One day in JC2 assembly, after the death of two canoeists (sailors? can't remember) was announced and a minute of silence was requested, the most rapid pencil sketch of rain (Nabokov again) fell onto the bowed heads. The heavens wept. A pathetic fallacy in real life.

2003-02-06T20:13:00.000-05:00

So Thursdays I have Expos from 10 to 11, and then I'm done. I squirmed around on my bed for a bit, wracked by phlegmy coughs and little sniffles, and then I made the cold, windy but sunny 15-minute walk to Bread and Circus off Central Square. I'd thought that I'd just grab some small lunch/tea things, but I ended up tottering back to the dorm under the weight of three big paper bags. I assembled lunch/tea:

Baguette, organic
Olive oil
Tomatoes, Canadian
Bocconcini, fragile bouncy balled foeti swimming in amniotic fluid
Assorted olives
Roasted red peppers, something wrong about this, suan-meish; bad vinegar?
Parsley scallion hummus
Honey dijon kettle chips (only 1.19!)

I passed on the Dalmatian tapenade.

Not a very economical option though; having spent 42 bucks on effectively nothing (these were nothing-groceries, little indulgences to fill my spare time and stomach space, smallish canapé/antipasto items, as opposed to real-groceries, like whole chickens, large pieces of offal, bundles of bak choy, etc). Still, I am assured of nice breakfasts for at least the next two days. Baguette (a little stale by then, but no matter), ashtray of olive oil (found a use for it at last!), couple of choice olives for salt counterpoint, glass of juice. Austere early-morning luxury away from Annenberg.

2003-01-31T20:43:00.000-05:00

I'm back. Someone's insisted that I write very "one-note", so here's a conventional journal-like entry. I will try not to have any alliterative liaisons or other gratuitous effects, but if some slip in, I'm sorry.

So. London was warm, cloudy and expensive. They're big on refectory-style dining, hobnobbing at the same table, being seen with the be-seen. I had almost certainly the two best pizzas in my life, both on the same day. I had Mediterranean, Italian, French/Belgian, Indian, Thai, Japanese, Chinese and English. Yes, English. I hear you retching. This was no ordinary pub grub.

Roasted bone marrow, crostini, parsley and caper salad ("butter from God", according to Anthony Bourdain)
Mallard-magret (there! caught myself), red cabbage and rosemary

As someone who finds even crabs disproportionately troublesome, in ratio to their taste, to deal with, I didn't quite relish thrusting my crab-fork blindly into those cavernous cylinders (again I falter) for a full 45 minutes. Not quite butter from God, but definitely a very superior lubricant for bread. And who would've guessed, parsley, "always the wrong erb", making an absolutely perfect accompaniment? And the mallard. Which had a very ducky bouquet and therefore was not in the least divine. But it was raw, erotically odorous, reeking of duckiness and the stench of foul poultry (ok, that I admit is inexcusable), giving you to feel slightly naughty, bestial, heck, macho even. No dainty juxtapositions, delicate melds of compatible flavors. This was in-your-face, untrussed by culinary artfulness; a cooked piece of murdered bird, the barely twiddled-with aftermath of an avian masectomy.

No that probably wasn't quite the typical journal entry.

So OK I bought a pair of StyleLab jeans which I can't stop wearing, a cool sweater/jumper/sweatshirt/pullover (have I missed one, H?), and a couple of trashy dancey LPs at 49p each. And drank at least 30 clementines' (mandarin oranges) worth of juice. About 7 espressos. An excellent tarte au citron. Skordalia.

There, that's more like it. Lists. Why do people like to make lists? It's because they want to say, look, I'm cool, I did all this in this space of time, I like obscure music, I eat at the poshest places, I read highbrow lit, don't you wish you were as cool as I am. Lists validate tenuous existences, buttress flagging self-esteem, conspicuously enumerate the stuff we do and then forget about. But if you write it down, you can say, well, that's what I did today, that's some pretty cool shit, I feel fulfilled, I am cool, life is good.

2003-01-01T05:31:00.000-05:00

O-ka-mé, a wondrous warm-wooded sanctum seating all of twenty people, adjuncture to the Copthorne Waterfront, along the thankfully still-undiscovered Robertson Quay-Waterfront Plaza stretch. Where the streets are not paved with gold, but studded with prismatic sequins. Here you may also find a fabulous bridge of modernist antic, giving the illusion of a skewed declension by rising like a boomerang in oblique flight.

Slinky-smoky shishamo
Delicately deliquescent crumbcased oysters
Ume-shiso maki (preserved plum/suan1mei2 and perilla leaf); nori still bites crisp over cusp of tooth
Magical, magical sweet potato tempura
Tamago sushi with a floppy slab of sweet egg draped over a pressed parcel of rice half its size: a gently gambolling snow-white lamb being indecorously mounted and buggered by a swaggering randy ram.

2002-12-27T23:20:00.000-05:00

After six months of preparation, French fine dining outfit Salut is now Salut: The Meeting Place, where there's an interactive theatre floor show for more adventurous diners. Expect the floor staff dressed in can-can outfits to perform a spirited dance during dinner, and mingle with guests. The French cuisine remains consistent.

To begin-
South: Flower crab pattie [sic] wafting forth magic Mughal spice, tomato-olive Provençal relish
North: Herbal dun4 tang1 with shui3 jiao3
West: Parsnip velouté abloom with froth, ikura
Center: Ditto

Next-
South: Braised lamb shank and mash
North: Prismatic mushroom risotto (parsley flecks, carrot confetti)
West: Chilean seabass, cannellini/flageolet/navy/white bean ragout
Center: "Attack of the Oil Spill" petrochemically-infused Chilean seabass

Last-
South: Lemon-vanilla soufflé
North: Apple prune vodka crumble, spice-cream
West: Jasmine tea crème brûlée, passionfruit sorbet
Center: Ditto

Unfortunately, only the bread, butter and dessert were consistent. Burgundy awnings? A hysterical gesture. One of the twins has vanished, as has half the clientele. Boccelli and Brightman...and then a composure-shattering shift into corny country line-dance stuff.

2002-12-24T01:05:00.000-05:00

French theme restaurant and entertainment
Big Apple Amoy
Johanna father frog
Donald Pan Satanist
Aksi Mat Yo Yo
Donald duck paedophile
Malays eating their cats

My my, Maxwell char kway teow is very very nice.

NO You can't turn here! You'll SLOW me down
Why NOT, you don't have the LEGAL RIGHT to stop ME

2002-12-21T00:07:00.000-05:00

Unless I am severely mistaken, Thanying's Pad Thai is very inferior to Spice's!

Gaetano continues to work his subtle sorcery hidden away in an obscure "print institute" along the river, overhanging plumbing-scaffolding exposed, denuded concrete floors. White asparagus and air-dried beef, squid ink linguine are exemplary. Too bad about the panfried banana-custard lor-bak-gou.

And at last, my three-month old craving for proper XLB has been sated. Not those pudgy pastegobs, like chewing a brick, those anaemic scallion pancakes. CJ bakes their chongyoubing, which makes all the difference. Crumbly and talcum-dry, not frazzled and greasy.

Finally, the disinterred gem that is Sushi Jyo, just a 10 min walk from Orchard and its sad long-queued Sakaes/Teis etc. All your manifold cravings attended to, cru ou cuit, grilled and steamed, deep-fried and hotpotted. Sukiyaki morsels brewing in sweet sauce, out of one bath and into another, this time a slick raw egg immersion. J's hamachi chin is unfortunately slightly overdone. Too many tentacular bits though: squid sashimi, squid tempura, baby octopus tempura.

2002-12-01T18:30:00.000-05:00

First. Being accosted by salespersons in large flagships in downtown Chicago is not pleasant.
Second. Cheesecake factory is a huge sham. Go and eat somewhere else, you silly people! Interior is vaguely Gaudy, plastered with mosaic panels, well-hung with prodigious donuts and obese pretzel-shapes.
Third. Just before this week I lumped Korean food together with the other icky joke-cuisines of the world (English, Mexican, Russian). Now I take that all back. The mini smorgasbord of itsybitsy prickly pickly pieces of this and that, irresistable. Kimchi. Radish cubes in choudoufu sauce. Treated watercress. Dried cuttlefish strands/dessicated whitebait? Tangly candy-seaweed. And the dining room which is neither cosy nor homely, but comforting. In the same way that certain B-grade maudlin Chinese films and Japanese serials are. 10/10. 2659 W. Lawrence Ave., Chicago, IL 60625. Tel. 773.878.2095.
Fourth. FUCKS YEAH!
Fifth. I trust it is by now quite clear that any restaurant whose altitude is billed as its chief attraction must necessarily serve perfunctory food?
Sixth. Despite my reservations about contemporary and conceptual art, it's still perversely alluring. The defiant archness, the tenuous irony. Which I object to paying to view and hence did not.
Seventh. The facade of the Regenstein library rocks. As does Big Bird and Barney.
Eighth. At last, a drinking culture which is founded not on substance abuse but rather "substance enjoyment." Pina Kokomo-ladas in the dead of winter are fitting. As are tropical Singapore Slings in a fucking frigid city.
Ninth. What's a getaway without conspicuous consumption?
Tenth. Smoking weed in the yard at 3pm and then playing frisbeeeeeee while thus...influenced.

2002-11-19T20:13:00.000-05:00

Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

I am beginning to miss home, but for all the wrong reasons. Ah, sweet monotony. The familiarity of a narrow landscape. The bliss of a dissipated life! Dawdling, vegetating, drifting. M is off to Tokyo! And here I languish. Ah! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

Why do I keep running into the same people?

At this point my idea of time elegantly and perfectly wasted would be: tea-time things taken while tossing around tea-time trivialities, languid dialogue while flÂning in the dead chill of night.

There is something very compelling I find lately in Chinese film. That squalor, clamour, picturesque sordidness that is so uniquely...Oriental? Also, I fear my Francophilia is waning. Godard's Eloge de l'amour, so very, very pretty, crystalline, lapidary black and white footage. But what, WHAT does it all MEAN? I used to enjoy deliberate opacity. Now: either I am distracted by sensual music, or I can no longer pretend that I enjoy unageing intellect.

2002-10-27T00:54:00.000-04:00

Metro, jazz with deep-legged slinky bass, dusky pool-hall, studly alpine-cabin/lurid-diner furniture forcedly strung together with standard French trinkets. Duck rillettes strangely spiked with Arabian spice, onion soup passable, steak au poivre a tad insipid but redeemed by molassessey sauce and exemplary wilted spinach, chocolate souffle emaciated and stiffened, coconut sorbet clingy.

I desperately need to renovate my social strategy. I confess I am loathe to "work" at networking, but enough is enough. More self-determinacy, I say. "All unavoided is the doom of destiny. / True, when avoided grace makes destiny".

Ann Coulter, Liberalism and Terrorism: Two Stages of the Same Disease.
Godard's à bout de souffle.
I think I'll watch Babette's Feast again.

2002-10-18T21:16:00.000-04:00

Attributed in the murkiness of my mind to an Argentinian tango instructor, on the pages of Wallpaper no less:

Two bodies come together for an instant, touch, and then part. That is love, life, the world.

And again; this time I'm pretty sure who it is though - Saint-Exupéry:

Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward in the same direction.

I used to visit all the very gay places
Those come-what-may places
Where one relaxes on the axes of the wheel of life
To get the feel of life

2002-10-16T00:23:00.000-04:00

Listening to A's shite Everything But The Girl LP, eating Cape Cod potato chips and Hershey's dark choc nuggets, drinking grapefruit juice.

"There is beauty in dodginess". Is there really? Of course I understand the perverse magnetism of pop culture, of "sacramentalized mediocrity". I like Debussy and Mozart, Daft Punk and Jay Chou. "Polarities have become equatorial. There is nothing left in between beauty and crassness".

I must practise placing periods within the quotation marks. Blasted academic writing conventions.

What a curiously self-abasing phenomenon it is to learn a foreign language. To be made to feel like a child again. To prune one's thoughts till they fit into the stilted grammatical configurations which you are capable of forming at the moment. To avoid certain tenses because they have tedious conjugations.

I'm quitting ballroom. I have no poise. And besides, the Smallville girl isn't there anymore.

Things I miss:
1. Familiar people
2. CJLMXLB's Xiao Long Bao
3. The dissonant cadences of guttural Singlish
4. Salut's 25/28/32 (on reflection, a steal even at 32) SGD set lunch
5. Three-course extravaganzas for decent prices
6. Half-price tÊte-a-tÊtes at mezza9 (I can't type a circumflexed non-capital E!)
7. Sprawling expanse of junkspace
8. Cheapness and beauty
9. The period April-August '02 in general
10. Paris and Lyon
11. Hong Kong

"And I have known the eyes already, known them all -
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?"

2002-09-30T23:29:00.000-04:00

Je suis ici. J'ai pensé que je le voudrais, mais j'avais tort. Je travaille quatorze heures chaque semaine, et pourtant je suis toujours fatigué. Je veux m'amuser bien, mais tout le monde est si sérieux. Je veux rencontrer des peuples intéressants, mais je ne peux pas les trouver. Je veux faire plus des activités, mais je n'ai pas assez de temps. Et aussi, je suis malade. La vie est affreuse. Mais la nourriture est plus mauvais. C'est pourquoi je vais souvent aux restaurants pour manger, comme celui-ci:

Spice
24 Holyoke Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

I count myself, unabashedly, among the cognoscenti when it comes to food. I was born and raised in Singapore, where a staggering variety of regional and international cuisines steadily courts the diner’s attentions; where, already sated with a large lunch, people ravenously discuss what they shall devour for dinner that same day; where taxi drivers are polled regularly by newspapers on the best and most elusive hawker stalls island-wide.

I remember revolting at the food during the obligatory lunches in whichever Chinatown my family found ourselves in while on vacations abroad. The twiddling of Chinese cuisine, for instance, in an attempt to defer to a foreign palate, never ceases to amuse me. Bold flavours, robust odours, all attenuated and toned down to a median of blandness. This dish, and seven others only remotely similar to it, sloshed over with the same all-purpose sauce. Or, more unscrupulously, a restaurateur exploiting the relative ignorance of his clientele and passing off slapdash imitations as the real thing.

So which of these two cases applies to Spice, “fine Thai cuisine” on Holyoke Street? Adaptation, or simply fraudulence? Real Thai food, to my mind, is a harsh taskmaster, intransigently fiery and torrid, laced with demanding, domineering accents – lemongrass, basil, shallots. I didn’t quite expect the typical American palate to be able to hold up against the full assault. There was clearly going to have to be some compromise. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing, of course. I have vivid memories of nasal-laryngeal conflagrations brought about by incendiary Tom Yum soups or innocuously-colored green curries.

On this Saturday night, it was deftly crammed to capacity, with an additional twenty or so people spilling out onto the sidewalk, mostly cliquish undergraduates. Spirited conversation thrummed. And yet, despite the thick sheet of ambient noise and constricted seating, it slenderly avoided becoming just another frantic Oriental eatery with flagrant fluorescence and brusque service. Dark wood panelling. Sparing, warm lighting. And a host of perfectly poised waiters dexterously weaving in and out of the non-spaces between tables, taking orders and refilling glasses with a bit too much of a graceful flourish. “They’re all gay,” said V., her gaydar twitching restlessly.

How does one square “fine Thai cuisine” with the presence of beef satay, “shumai” and Thai “tempura” on the menu? We passed on the motley appetizers and each just ordered an entrée, of just-manageable proportions. Reworking a perennial favorite, their Crispy Pad Thai was a scraggly nest of brittle threads strewn with shrimp, chicken, bean sprouts, scallions, egg and ground peanuts, sweet and sticky and sour, the whole inescapably recalling peanut butter (which, to me, is a good thing). The Rad-Na (wide rice) Noodles were to all appearances a facsimile of a staple Singaporean dish, beef kway teow, which uses exactly the same ingredients (beef slices and Chinese broccoli, or kai lan) and a more or less similar gravy composed mainly of dark soy sauce. As someone who knows what he’s talking about, this was very good indeed.

The yellow curry emblazoned with a cautionary star (“Spicy”) was, at least to my desensitized spice-assailed palate, only faintly challenging, and had quite a number of irrelevant vegetables cluttering up the dish (although on hindsight perhaps they were meant to temper the spiciness – such as it is): pineapples, potatoes, and cherry tomatoes? The traditional accompaniments, I believe, are tiny Thai eggplants: mini-grenades of acridity, the size of a blueberry, spurting an intensely bitter juice when bitten into. But the curry itself was smooth and velvety, laden with an appropriately immoderate amount of coconut milk.

I was looking forward to that iconic Thai dessert, sticky rice with mango, but it was nowhere to be found. For those of you in the dark, this is a positively inspired pairing: gooey glutinous rice suffused with more circulation-clogging salty (no, seriously) coconut milk, rounded off by that most sensual of tropical fruits, the musky mango. All they had were some dubiously Thai ice-creams (green tea?) and Thai fruit (lychee, rambutan, longan).

Spice isn’t really the real thing, but it comes close. It makes adjustments in dishes where the full deal would probably repel the less spice-resistant. For the more intrepid, however, the unmitigated experience is there to hazard; just look out for the clearly-posted signs: two stars (“Hot and Spicy”), or the telltale names (“Seafood Kamikaze”).

2002-08-28T03:25:00.000-04:00

Clothes; that was easy. Books; there's no way I'll be able to bring along even ten percent of what I want to, so I settled for a desert-island, personal canon, my...key texts: Nabokov, Woolf, Borges, Brillat-Savarin/Fisher/David, Montaigne's Complete Essays, some more essays, and T.S. Eliot. Stray bits: Calvino's Winter's Night, Queneau's Exercises in Style, Harry Potter Vol. 1 (from J) and C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity (from T). All of which I fully intend to read/reread. Weight (including fat load of Harvard mailings and handbooks): 12.7 kg.

However, with music; each additional CD is a negligible burden, but each CD omitted or forgotten is going to make me incomplete. So in goes all the jazz which I can't live without, Ella, Billie, Django, Chet, ACJ, the SNZ extended family and bands of non-key members (excluding the Zippers themselves of course). In goes all the corny chansons francaises, the squeaks and scratches. In goes Mado and J's Pons-Contes-Edda, Ariodante, Galli-Curci (who looks like an embalmed ostrich on the cover), Cecilia's sotto voce Se tu m'ami. In goes the Chen Xiao Dong box set from WK and HY. And what of the music of my adolescence? From that period I'm taking only

The Bends
OK Computer
Stone Roses, self-titled
Joni Mitchell's Hits
Portishead live

Where are my female singer-songwriters? Where's all the Blur? This is telling. I can't listen to Tori anymore without a severe sense of disorientation (except for her novelty B-sides: Frog On My Toe, Purple People, Merman). And so I ferreted around for a compilation, dread word, that crystalline essence of chart action and commercial appeal, and I found CRUSH, "40 sweet and sour tracks", circa 1997. A sample:

Saturday Night, Suede
Champagne Supernova, Oasis
Oh Yeah, Ash
Lovefool, Cardigans
There She Goes (the original)
Something Changed, Pulp

So I'm taking this; my token gesture, to preserve something of the complete ebb and flow of my musical inclinations. Of course, there's lots more embarrassing stuff in mp3s on my laptop.

2002-08-26T23:56:00.000-04:00

After a night of macerating in their own fluids in the refrigerator:
Mozzarella has acquired rigor mortis
Rocket still abloom with greenness
Avocado is undiscoloured
Mushrooms have boosted flavour
Potato salad has self-dessicated

2002-08-26T14:18:00.000-04:00

Honey dijon crisps
Devilled pei dan (celery, ma you, la you, mirin, sesame seeds)
Portobello, white button, shitake, anchovies, parsley, pinenuts, Kalamata olives, Grana Padano shavings
Mozzarella, avocado, roasted peppers, basil, rocket, pinenuts
Grilled chorizo, potato shallot-parsley-dijon salad
Roasted pumpkin, eggplant, oregano
Steamed prawns, botched coriander-garlic aioli
Coriander egg white omelette
Simmered lao huang gua, black moss, dried oyster, dried scallop, mushroom
Untitled artisanal dairy product from the Pyrenees (sheepish Gouda)
Cheshire made in Shropshire
Grapes
Orange macadamia cheesecake
Chocolate truffle cake
Passion fruit-bitter lemon (supply restricted)
San Pellegrino Aranciata Amara
G&T
Limoncino, absolutely vile

Guests unwittingly subjected to a brain cleansing, not once but twice, by Mado's shrilly-shattery B flat from Spargi and Les oiseaux. Colliding circles do little to dampen conviviality. But as is usual with any group larger than two, I never get in the desired amount of get-togetherness with each individual person. And never the proper...closure. I go to bed, sufficiently nostalgic to be unable to sleep, wondering if I would have been better served by keeping my selves discrete.

2002-08-25T10:16:00.000-04:00

This week's compendium edition. Life is revving up into a higher gear, idleness is ebbing away, where is the time for contemplation and composition?

Wed 21.8. Lunch at Hu Cui. The most magical Chinese dessert ever. Black pearls in osmanthus soup; nuances of starfruit and sugarcane.

Thurs 22.8. Back to school for the last time. And then to Alliance Francaise for the free placement test. "Ce n'est pas mal!" Really? I "have" "one year" of French, 180 hours of tuition. Is that all? After drilling myself on Edith Piaf and certain airy arias. What about my extensive menu vocabulary? Dinner with Y at mezza9, I have really run out of things to eat. The same seven desserts again.

Fri 23.8. Had my bad horror fix. There is something essentially very silly about cursed dolls, possessed puppets. And Thai cinema is absolutely fixated on voodooed effigies, petty revenge plots set in rural locales, preferably with large swamps for the hapless to fall into and drown in. But the last of the trio, the Hongkong one, was quite excellent. Dinner at Singa Inn seafood, with "ASEAN cultural performances" and lots of Eighties phenomena. Dessert at Tamade, where D "trains up" his intoxicant capacity.

Sat 24.8. I spend a good hour consoling a friend (clearly suicidal, drinking to Portishead) before I am rescued by SL, and am then displaced, stuck with two Germans and a very statuesque stewardess. He's OK now, I think. (Don't look back in anger.) That bitch! That flame-retardant witch! The bonfire bombed. Night dwindles alarmingly into inanities, 7-up, Bigfish Smallfish Who What Har. But still the most fun I've had in awhile. I wish KY best of luck with C.

Sun 25.8. Family day. Singsong session at home after lunch, my grandmother the retired chanteuse, my baby cousin the piano prodigy who failed her sight-reading. And yes, I did Chen Xiao Dong. But this I swear is the last time. No, really.

2002-08-14T03:12:00.000-04:00

Silk Road, 12.8.02.
Arraigned for premeditated illegitimate book-buying at lunch. Never have I heard such baseless speculation, circular arguments, sensational fabrication. I sat, like St. Sebastian, an innocent martyr, being pelted hexalaterally by so many "arrows of truth", fervently shot by a round table of jurors and Justices. Of course, the crime is far more heinous than this. It is in fact a theft perpetrated against the entire global readership, a desecration of a shrine of learning, a detraction from a communal treasury. The proceedings drag, even more than typical legal tussles, until the Court realises that they have forgotten to pay for the duck noodles. And thus commences a further dialectic on the merits of playing Robin Hood and being agents of income redistribution from management to service staff by leaving a "tip" of the value of the omitted item. What lunacy to reward the waitress for her auditing blunder, though! In the end (although of course the Court was nowhere approaching a cogent verdict on either of the mooted malfeasances), foundering in indecision and ill-focus, waitress attendant and anxious to shoo the overstayed guests away, our quixotic do-goodiness was countered by their more spontaneous and munificent "suan le, suan le".

* * *
A fairly large crowd turns up to see Huang Huang the panda on his last self-exhibition in this part of the world before returning to his native Berkeley, but everyone is quite satisfied with just knowing where he went to school and what he majored in.

"What a stupid woman you are, Lydia...Intelligence would take the bloom off your carnality...We are a perfect couple. She needs a patronising man, and I need a patronisable woman...The perfect murder is one in which the victim did it."

* * *
Thrilling, mortifying, tantalising, stupefying. Conversation was surprisingly fluid for a group which gathers (maybe) once a year. Whether this was merely glossy garrulousness, the freemasonry of the victorious, whose self-possession stems from a nominal kinship or titular association with excellence, was of course at the back of my mind throughout. There were unbelievable coincidences (what a publicity fillip it must be for R(A) to be able to bill their first three pioneering/consecutive editors as Harvard admits), enticing half-advice (who would want the giving to famish the craving?), a suspiciously comfortable ease...but that's just me, the cautious asocialite always wary of fast friends. And V's a Singaporean art history student! Encouraged me to "do something fun...like VES!" What a whiff of originality, glorious disregard for pragmatism.

In time, in time. Now - the horrid task of clearing up here. Two weeks to departure and still in a mess in as many ways as you care to name.

2002-08-11T12:42:00.000-04:00

Why don’t I do this more often. Circling and loitering around malls, a hideous reprise of secondary-school desultoriness. Scrabbling for congenial topics and failing, trotting out dull civilities and common-places. “Out upon such half-faced fellowship.” This curious compulsion to sustain derelict relationships, to protract an association whose founding circumstances have ceased to exist. Woody Allen in Annie Hall says something like, “a relationship is like a shark. It has to keep moving forward, or else it dies. And I think what we’ve got on our hands is a dead shark.”

Having become habituated to the company of dexterous interlocutors, sharp wits, mellow temperaments, engaging raconteurship, empathy and commiseration, the slightest departure from these conditions is enough to put me into a sullen, stoical mood. I can feign considerable concern for indifferent matters with some effort, but evincing even a wan interest in tiresome topics is almost onerous work (among sham emotions, I am most tight-fisted about dispensing false enthusiasm. Insincere sympathy is fairly easy to come up with, don’t you think?).

2002-08-09T09:30:00.000-04:00

This year's priceless spectacle of smurfery: ministers attired in antiseptic white, waving multi-tiered Ultraman lightstick-popsicles (the spiffiest party-favour ever!) AND nimbly gavotting at the same time. Elsewhere, anal Alice-in-Wonderland allegory wrenched out of perfectly pretty displays. Stirring symbols of racial diversity. Dick Lee adrift high above the crowd in a "Heliosphere". A man scaling an inflatable Everest, vicarious pinnacle-attainment for us all. The dignity of marches-past and military regalia cheapened by tawdry playthings and harlequin glitter.

I love the 80's remix of We Will Get There.

2002-08-07T12:48:00.000-04:00

Excellent antipasti to be had at Bologna (pulverised peppers, chlorinated Caprese, floral salmon carpaccio, fruity beef carpaccio, prosciutto with pallid figs and sunny dandelion petals, cod foo yong...and oysters which I can actually savour squirmlessly before swallowing) plus the best espresso I've had since France. Spaghetti vongole fortified by ardent sting of fresh and dried chillies, broth bracing and robust.

J's indigestion is obviously due to his insufficient Kalamata/Gaeta (?...dark purple, tender and emaciated variety) olive intake. But he insists on maligning the asparagus.

* * *
We are too late to catch Effi Briest without rushing our repast, so G and I resign ourselves to grazing languorously for three hours on crab cakes, yakitori, quarter-dozen oysters, lamb shank (braised duck-adobo) and the colourful cavalcade of confections (passionfruit pavlova and lime souffle are first-rate, although that's probably because they were the only things I could properly relish at that stage of satiety). All at half price.

2002-08-06T12:06:00.000-04:00

Y insists that I abjure my nascent literary pretensions and become a counter-tenor. A natural flutter, he says.

I have outgrown the airy, effete Les oiseaux phase, the gooseheaded French waltzes, and perhaps momentarily disengaged myself from the sprawling and soaring, the whooping and looping of Martern, Periglio and Sembiante. And now I'm trying to get a grip on Handel. His music is floreated but not flagrant, buoyed by (and yet at the same time, serenely afloat on) a ceaseless current. The tender, nubile capering of Volate, amori and Con l'ali di costanza, the stately sorrow of Scherza infida, the softly radiant ebb and flow and sotto voce grandeur of Dopo notte. Refrains of lambent beauty, making their reflux with a blushing da capo flourish and variation. Then of course there are the wings and flying, the gaudy gambol of Preparati and Dover.

Nadaman has the most wondrously tremulous chawanmushi.

2002-08-03T12:00:00.000-04:00

I've lost it, my capacity for novels has been hugely diminished after a recent forced diet of essays and belles-lettres: beloved Hazlitt, Lamb, Chesterton. Owing to what I desperately hope is a temporary dwindle in my attention span, I now need to interpolate spurts of surfing the Net, absently trawling stray articles, picking at the Economist which I took 2.5 years' leave from, conjugating the 10 French verbs I know in preparation for the Alliance diagnostic test (can't wait can't wait), wheedling along like a crippled giraffe through the fan ti foreword to my Qi Baishi monograph.

Been chuckling with tender indulgence at the "decontextualised debris" (YQ) of my Modern Art. For any piece of twiddled-with junk there will always be a corresponding community of credulous loons who will acclaim it as groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting. For the dogged and inveterate semioticist there are golden principles and radiant ideas to be extracted from anything. And in the end all we have is this: on one side, the bandying about of insolent, slenderly tenable slogans; on the other, affronted counter-electioneering for the vacuity of all this modern rubbish. Thus has the artistic dialectic of our age become fiercely partisan, fractured along strands of belief which are as fickle as fashion. But it generates discourse and colourful opposition. The pseudo-mystic passionately broadcasting his singular vision, the pursuant legion of reverential disciples, the outraged traditionalists upholding a dead aesthetic: what is this but the endlessly recurring, age-old wrangle between the establishment and the evangelists?

2002-08-02T13:37:00.000-04:00

The first feeble trickle of writing in awhile, a post-afternoon-nap, hasty half-hour verbal etch-a-sketch of an apology for Pale Fire; garbled, maddeningly scatterbrained and tangential, temperamental subjunctive clauses and runaway parentheses freestyling across the page, my Art Nouveau writing pad ("pension house for Australians"). Fishing for mermaids in salmon-rich waters. Drilling for drivel. Will-o'-the-wisp exegeses. A pathos special to gauche knight-errants, vagrants askew and attuned to a faraway, quavering music. N's scattered benediction conferred on disenfranchised, dispossessed, self-dislocated mongrels. Assiduous beguilement, illogical impulsion. K fortifying self with fabulation. Brittle valour. Tattered mythology. Cosmic magic of coincidence. Scintillae of erudite association buried under prosaic topsoil. This is the closest I've got to writing while in an altered state, and what a blooming tendrilled mess it is. But I think I've hit a rare note, chanced upon a warped locution. For that period I had an enhanced affinity for purple patches and startling liaisons; momentarily sharpened instincts at the fruit-machine game.

2002-07-28T02:03:00.000-04:00

JT's farewell luncheon with JL, Y, V and I at Club Chinois. They now undercut JNC by a full S$10, and discounting a small handful of ill-advised fusion fusses and minor blunders (indicated by *), could there be a finer place to fritter the afternoon away? Laura Fygi in the background is vaguely unsettling though.

*1. Suan ni bai rou, "Bovril sauce type" (JL)
2. Deepfried crustacean comets
3. Bicellular har kow with English mustard
4. Yam croquette surreptitiously strewn with parsley, which is "always the wrong erb" (Y)
5. Salmon sashimi with an "aged richness" (JL) which induces harmonised pleasure-groans
6. Quick-fried squid-prawn bounce-blossoms with sugar peas in shellfish bisque
7. Braised-deepfried seabass-cod with fragrant mushrooms
8. Rack of lamb with mango salsa and carrotcake cubes
*9. Salmon in dragon's beard sliver-cocoon with chilli sauce two ways
*10. Caesar salad of uncommon sweetness
11. Suckling crackling
12. Assorted Chinese charcuterie
13. Veal tenderloin cubes in pepper sauce
14. Phoenix claws
15. Chinese spinach in high-grade soup with three eggs
*16. Waterlogged century eggs, potent sort
17. Ziggurat of spinach-smeared tofu and nameko mushrooms
18. Hua diao herbal chicken elixir
*19. Seafood dumpling in Penang laksa-borshcht-minestrone
20. Braised shark's fin with steamed egg and silversprouts
21. Wasabi mayo prawns (this I think enjoys undeserved celebrity, along with miso cod)
22. Summerberry tiramisu
*23. Wallaby foetus, fallen into bowl of boiling almond milk
24. Mango otak-blancmange with succulent hairs of pomelo
25. Chng tng-guilinggao

Photo shoot in the Club 21 gallery linking the Four Seasons and the Hilton, the one with the perfectly ergonomic chairs which demand uprightness and poise of you.
Models splayed on glass panel.
Peranakan marriage parody, ossified postures, seated bride and groom laterally separated by long austere altar on which rests a stunningly incongruous designer vase containing gnarled Pocky-pretzel plants.
Derring-do around a toilet bowl, naughty dalliance at the urinals, more Magritte mirror-compositions.

2002-07-24T11:14:00.000-04:00

In this day and age of nasal-congestion sprays, snazzy dentistry, anal probes and colonial douching, the most sophisticated implement we have to clear out our ears with is the feeble cotton bud (although JL insists their proper function is to induce orgasms; roll them around the aural G-spot, bilaterally caressing both canals at the same time with the candyfloss). When things get really sticky, the doctor draws forth his enormous syringe which, let's face it, is a pretty naughty size and shape, shoves it up your narrow orifice and proceeds to shoot the shit out of your head, with screaming pulses and flatulent gurgles of warm water.

Similarly, few routine health procedures involve as much notional head-on carnage as the scaling and polishing of teeth at obligatory six-month intervals: the dentist grimly brandishing his squealing instruments, attacking and grinding down your rock-faces, refining your pearly quarries, spurting a fine grimy mist of tartar, blood, saliva.

* * *
One of the twins pounces on JL as we step into Salut for the first time in a very long while. They look slightly sheepish, subtly contrite for having dared to raise prices in spite of the depressed economy (but of course everyone knows the fine dining industry is impervious to the fluctuating ebb and flow of economic cycles. The wealthy set, insulated from and undiminished by the downturn, still need their foie gras, their Chilean seabass, their oeufs a la truffe blanche at S$40 each). The Japanese-fetish contagion first contracted by M. Stroobant has spread here. Edamame? Mameko mushrooms? Uh-oh.

JL and Y both have the prawn "tempura" with apple compote, JT and I have the staple seared scallops, this time without the viscous sesame glue. Faultless as usual. Then "panfried smoked duck breast in hay" (formerly "panfried hay-smoked duck breast"). (Expected to manger a manger) Slightly more truculent than usual, but customarily robust in flavour, and a beautiful meld with the asparagus risotto. The desserts are astonishing. Warm pear tart, the mille-feuille butterflake sort, with mascarpone ice cream. Dark choc-Bailey's bavarois with caramelised hazelnut (MIA), a quivering caldera which requires a steady hand to eat properly.

* * *
"We can do more to get greater enjoyment from our waterbodies."
"Rustic fun at Coney Island". Is it just me, or does this have an inescapable sexual innuendo of the strapping-farmhand-and-buxom-milkmaid-rollicking-in-the-hay sort.
A brief photo shoot in the orange-walled lounge, me as photographer, Y as creative director.
We are especially incensed at the slapdash delineation of The Nangka in the models; one looks like Strepsils and the other looks like that pink kueh which is like soon kueh except its stuffing is glutinous rice and not turnip. Such careless replication of textural detail!

* * *
I don't really tell jokes per se, nor do I care to hear many (especially not from people who think themselves very engaging raconteurs, the "life/live wire of the party", masters of occasioned and orchestrated banana-peel humour). I prefer the spontaneous combustion of a writhing wit, the flighty revelry of a free intelligence. Hijacks, offshoots, swerves, ricochets, hairpin bends, oblique and astounding L-shaped knight moves.

2002-07-22T10:13:00.000-04:00

For the most part I think I make a strenuous effort to eschew flaccid sentiment and corny trash in all their guises: sappy boybands, conversational platitudes, paralysing social ritual. It has always been about intellectual probity, the impulsion to nobler things and loftier ideals, principled severity and discrimination, the repudiation of ignorance where such ignorance is remediable. But such trifles and tritenesses, surrendered to infrequently, spark in me a fuller measure of critical sharpness and clear-eyed mordancy. There can be no accurate appreciation and praise of genius without prior schooling in the recognition and execration of mediocrity.

Also, they are confessedly a diversion, and a lazy indulgence in mental laxity. A reprieve from an exaltedness I seldom feel able to live up to; from wrestling with complexity; from stalemates and contradictions. An unvarying excellence of company is a daunting and wearying prospect. Surrounded by ingenuousness, I am entirely at ease, unpressured and unguarded. The constant nurture of ardent eloquence in defence of higher things is a terrible and unremitting strain.

Oh, what pretentious rubbish. That can't possibly explain all the brazen Chen Xiao Dong concerts, the relentless magnetism of KTV lounges, all the other inconstancies, the shameless aberrant behaviour which I cannot reconcile even to myself. I am looking for middle ground, when all compromise appears untenable. I stand here, a neurotic tangle, but with personas pliant; open-jawed, facing my first real identity crisis (and what an absurd notion that is, says the Nabokovian harshness in me): can DDD and DDD cohabit the same person? Henceforth, that is. They have been congenitally conjoined in me. The question is whether the conjunction is possible for much longer.

That has been my adolescent life, that Flaubert quote you see at the top of the page.

I went swimming alone today, rediscovering the bliss of being buoyant, segueing through fluidity, feeling frictionless and unretarded.

I am even dressing differently. G would be happy to know this.

2002-07-21T11:37:00.000-04:00

19.07.02, 1400
A historic tabular configuration: A, S, S, T and myself in the ultra-soigne Restaurant 360, glass panelling inscribed with glib quotations tangentially relevant to food and the enjoyment thereof, sunlight-freshened vestibule containing eight shrink-office-type swivel chairs and Zen pebble landscaped-ashtrays. Not quite 360 degree view of nascent waterfront developments, trawling boats and The Nangka. As A has suppressed his foreknowledge I blindly order a catastrophic garble of an entree, tuna tataki with marinated couscous in tomato and watermelon consomme. On second thought, I have only myself to blame. How could I possibly not have sensed the disorderly constructedness, the shrieking disjuncture? Fishy and fruity? What was I thinking. What were they thinking. Also what the hell is tankatsu. Parcelled red mullet and mushroom ragout better, mascarpone ice cream full of throat-abrading sediment. A pleasant white selected by A, slick, sanguine and honeyed. Conversation is stilted, disgracefully so for a group whose members are more or less strung together by extant strands of relation, however tenuous.

* * *
Disco Dancing Darryl threatens to appear this night, but the recrudescence is disrupted by Dutifully Disparaging Darryl, who is a bit stuporous owing to the day's irregular meal schedule. He however readily obliges to vegetating at the Milkbar with A, who, finding the company insipid, plays an absoultely riveting game of snakes and ladders with himself.

[The events which follow this have been deemed inappropriate material for public disclosure and are for the participants' relish only.]

2002-07-18T02:19:00.000-04:00

22.06.02 Mercredi: la ville rose
Sky of milky blue, cloudless, modulating into a deeper but more diffident shade. Bleached russet, ochre, burnished persimmon and ripe jambu. Here pigeons are more daring, avoiding oncoming traffic sometimes on foot. Light confers lustre on leaves, sets shadows on the facades of buildings.

Sipping attenuated coffee opposite the entrance to the Basilique St. Sernin, apart from the infernal roar of a passing motorcycle, the atmosphere is simply perfect - studiedly shaded, precise colour-concordance, air cool and inert. Sparing chatter, squealing swallows (robins? orioles, thinks J.), padding saunter of pedestrians. And thankfully, how few of them there are!

rue de Taur is exceptionally picturesque: pawn-shaped balusters, burnt sienna, "garnet and pencil-lead" colour scheme (cf. Bordeaux: sandy clamshell, weatherlashed sepia, "uncooked wholewheat pasta")

Sheltered by a venerable maple on a quay of the Garonne, small mound of dogshit three metres away (but fortunately downwind from me), anonymous violinist performing practice passages in the apartment above my rear. An obnoxious street-cleaner has just swept the shitstack away, dispersing its foul fragrance into the currents of air flowing beneath my nose. Now there is a daubed shitsmear across the sidewalk; a Pollock swish-splodge. Assortment of summertime insects roost on my trousers, on J.'s nose, on my arm where I flick them away, assuming them to be inanimate particles which will not form pulverised pasty pigments when accidentally squished. Beleaguered by swarms of divebombing insects, we adjourn to the riverbank proper, copiously shaded but still bug-prone. Flies circle our heads, never landing, but still a loathesome thought.

We visit the Jardin des Plantes, a prettily-preened piece of greenery where nuclear family foursomes frolic, geriatrics vegetate, couples stroll. There is a most curious species here,

Cupressacees Calocedrus Decurrens

a fairy-tale sort of tree, a marooned stage prop from the forest which Little Red Riding Hood traverses to get to her granny's: waxy to the point of artifice, plasticky sheen, unnaturally varnished trunk and branches, eerily anthropomorphic.

There are only so many fat-soaked mushy beans one can eat in the course of an evening. Duck and beans seem to me an unimaginative and far from optimal pairing. Surely the addition of an assertive herb or alternate vegetable would supply the necessary counterpoint. I am thinking rosemary and shallots/celery/leek. As it is it lacks sufficient dimensions to keep me engaged throughout. What is more, it is exceedingly liable to congeal into a molassey mess if you do not dispose of it rapidly enough. This is food to induce sloth, listlessness, languor.

2002-07-16T13:11:00.000-04:00

06.07.02 Saturday
Expedition to Notting Hill Gate tube station where the Portobello Confederation is located. All (most) dealers use the same plastic bag to distribute to their customers, and there is the uncanny presence of an information counter. Specialties of every conceivable and ludicrous sort are here: Ottoman antiques, cigarette ephemera, fin-de-siecle lace and glassware. Prices uniformly huge. I spot the exact same frameless uncircumscribed magnifying glass (jade and silver according to dealer) which I bought for SGD 20, for GBP 20. Shooed out of countenance by draconian antique postcard-dealer after I disrupt his arcane classification system which I imagined I was respecting.

From the entrance of the antique dealer concatenation the colour series scheme of the toy-buildings is: bleached lavender, Yakult orange, rose-salmon, cyan, baby blue, cream, Baskin Robbins Daiquiri Ice, butter, cream, sailor blue, chalky grey, Bouillon Racine green, butter, capsicum red...

Our momentous lunch at the Ivy has all the mystique and privileged aura of a secret society congregation. The door bitch says not "this way please" but rather "please come through" - we have cleared the hurdle of actually securing a reservation. The atmosphere however is not terribly rarefied - clearly the preserve of Bright Young Things and old money, but the tables are abuzz with animated conversation, vitality, laughter. "Frank Lloyd Wright horizontality". Diamond lozenges of stained coloured glass in apparently aleatory mosaic. Insidiously comfortable, even cosy. We have I think the best table in the house, a bloated crayon:

[limitations of layout preclude the inclusion of my sketched diagram]

Wholegrain bread excellent, as is the ivy leaf-embossed pat of butter. Weekend lunch menu, GBP 17.50:

1. Plum tomato and basil galette/Minted pea soup
2. Veal chopped steak, fried egg, chips, tomato relish/Roast free-range chicken, sage-onion stuffing, crispy bacon
3. Lemon meringue pie/Vanilla amaretti ice cream, peach compote

Everything was excellent, the lemon meringue pie trumping all the tartes au citron I had; the chopped steak a dressed-down Ivy burger in casual garb, perfectly grilled, egg perfect - limpid diaphanous white, quivering yolk, perfect chips, fluffy vs. crispy (inside vs. outside), tomato relish a synthesis of English condimental quintessences to form a new whole - ketchup, Heinz's sweet relish (green sort), mustard, chopped tomatoes, parsley, onions. J's dessert is the best sundae I've ever had - freshly compoted peach of a blushing sunset shade. We drink sparkling Malvern (Schweppes), 3.50 per litre, plus cover charge ("main dining room") of 1.50 and two person tip of 6.00, I pay 24.00 for the historic package, every penny gloriously squandered.

Woman: Excuse me, could you tell me where the washroom is?
Waiter: (without gesture) It's upstairs, madam.
Woman: (hysterically physical) Upstairs? Where? (points flagrantly) There? (looking like a wind-vane)
Waiter: (strenuously and obdurately stony in his gestureless direction) It's upstairs, madam. Upstairs.

A quick peek at the National Portrait Gallery, then we choose Tate Modern (Matisse-Picasso) over Tate Britain (Lucian Freud). Exterior: a Legollection of bricks chosen carefully for variance in hue. Interior: in the Turbine Hall of Gothic altitude, Tiffany-blue boxes adhere to soaring scaffolds of steel - boxkites, blueboxing.

Rooms are airy and vacant of obstruction (discounting tourists), with a disturbing but not unpleasant smell of macerated fruit/apricot-prune cake in the still-life gallery. I am pleased to find Svankmajer's Dimensions of Dialogue on exhibition, especially the first part with the cannibalistic Archimboldo heads. "This civilisation eats everything. It eats nature, whole cultures, but also love, liberty and poetry and it changes these into the odious excrement of the society of consumption and mass culture." Another Modigliani Tete, this time a limestone sculpture. A Klimt of diaphanous beauty, Portrait of Hermine Gallia, faded gossamer glamour threatening to vanish like an apparition. Damien Hirst's Pharmacy feels like a set from Sleeper, a Disney day-glo medicinal superstore. Dare I admit that one of the Pollocks quite caught my eye? But no, I changed my mind. Mortifying section on Mondrian and De Stijl. Lots of ludicrous "conceptual art": Michael Craig-Martin's An Oak Tree (A Glass Of Water) being the grovelling low point. Visitors proclaim it a "humpty-dumpty approach to life" and "sort of pseudo-philosophical", while of Duchamp's Fountain, one witless American dame says "I like the white, that it's all white". Elaboration (unintentioned?) of Duchamp in the toilet where the sinks are exemplars of tacit gadgetry, draining by the side via a slight incline.

[again I regret that the relevant drawing must be omitted]

2002-07-15T09:15:00.000-04:00

27.06.02 Jeudi. Bordeaux Fete le Vin

1. Ste. Croix du Mont, blanc doux (deep urine)
"apply stalkish", dried apricots, beer, sultanas, honey, Melrose Place.

2. Favory, Cremant de Bordeaux, blanc sec ("lacklustre chrysanthemum tea")
Salers/Roquefort-like, foamy, speciously gaseous, leekish-onion tinge, Hugo Boss.

3. Chateau Fourcas Hosten, rouge sec-doux (attenuated ewes' blood)
blackberry-andouillette, gamey, Hungarian.

4. Falliol, Cotes de Bordeaux, rouge sec ("dark-dark-dark pink")
blackcurrants, traitorous, xing2 shu1

5. Saussignac, blanc doux (liquid gold/potent urine)
vanilla topnotes, carebears, peaches, "pears", Florida.

6. Haut-Medoc, rouge sec (arterial blood)
Roquefort, andouillette, incense, "offaly", watery (due to rainwater falling into glass)

2002-07-15T09:03:00.000-04:00

21.06.02 Vendredi
Montmartre, the toy-bright district of Paris, tortuous alleys, hectoring caricaturists, vendors of simulacrum posters and postcards. The Montmartrobus driver negotiates the twists effortlessly. I finally am impelled to try to capture something on film. Fiddling with the functions, with the raging erection of the zoom lens, I attempt to frame a band of gargoyles.

In the Basilique du Sacre Coeur the chanting of hymns dissipates in a plangent, tremulous hum. How far is it correct to augment the interior with artificial spotlights? It must have been pretty dark in the hallowed gloom back then. Cardinals groping their way to the confession booth, sermons resonating over the tenebrific congregation, priors bumping into precariously poised altars.

I like the draughty metro stations, the musky smell of the gopher passages, the double barrier that must be wrestled with upon leaving the station, the artful debris contributing their miscellaneous odours, the dilapidated ceilings which threaten to drip away eventually.

Afternoon at the Louvre. At the very start of the Italian painting gallery gaggles of goggle-eyed bumblers are channelled by velvet-rope dividers into two streams of traffic - those who wish to gaze upon the Mona Lisa and therefore would like to get through this bothersome prelude as soon as possible; and those who having seen the one thing they came to see are in a hurry to get to the souvenir shop before it runs out of Mona Lisa postcards/posters/coasters/jigsaw puzzles. This is: primordial hunter-gatherer instincts, the craving for trophy items, transposed dramatically onto a modern vacation-industry setting.

The Vermeers are perhaps a little less lambent than what I imagined to be the case, but the light effects are enchanting, his subjects' attitude one of classical poise. Pieter de Hooch compares favourably I think (there is a certain amount of superstitious idolatry about Vermeer). I had little patience for the large-format Rubens - religious allegories, resplendent historical tableaux, portraits of hideous royals. Catherine de Medici looks like a rodent-troglodyte-dwarfess. I dislike expansive panoramas, preferring trenchant concision, modesty in the scale of conception; repose to conflict, (clucking) domesticity to savagery. Delftian interiors offer both in abundance.

2002-07-14T13:27:00.000-04:00

22.06.02 Samedi
Provisioness of cheese to the presidential palace, Marie-Anne Cantin, was absent from her store, presumably beneath, in her subterranean storehouse attending to her children.

Emmental de Savoie, francaise
Less milky, more socky and woody

Salers
"better than Laguiole"
A remarkable taste gradient. Near the nose/centre, a taste of wine prevails; closer the rind/outer perimeter, there is an alarming bouquet of Chinese dried goods.

Brie de Meaux
Excellent. Well-rounded, dulcet and smooth, precisely imitating the taste of daikon. Is this what is meant by "mushroomy"?

We sit on a bench, truncated view of leg of Eiffel Tower, spectators to a spectacular Magrittean sky - clouds ominously well-defined by dramatic outlines, a vista which you know may just be a bit of a painting, or an illusive suburb or figment of reality, which may be deported away like stage backdrops in an instant; spirited off by the artist's machinations on a whim.

Dichotomy of croissants:
A) Soft cottony fluffy tangle of wispy threads group
B) Charred crispy mille-feuille like group

I think the charred version more suited to eating (as discrete elements) with hunks of cheese. Cottons are more receptive to the spreading of conserve on them.

J's cassoulet d'oie is a frightening molassesey mire of flageolets in fat; redneck-trucker food or its equivalent; the nourishment of the yeoman stock of heartlander France.

The Musee d'Orsay stops at neo-impressionism so no Modiglianis to linger over here, unfortunately.

The Degas, especially the pastels, are opalescently beautiful. His figures, touched by dusky shadows, are best when their faces are not seen, bashfully turned away from the viewer, or backlit in tender relief. Insinuation is his dominant mode. Shimmering light, never flagrant incandescence. His Danseuses bleues have a coy deportment, crucially elliptical outlines of the vaguest sort, wispy, ethereal, cloudy suspensions for tutus.

Some Monets strike me as slapdash, visual jugglery and cantrip. Manet is not a favourite, although two of his still lifes, terse impressions, are quite brilliant - L'asperge and Le Citron. Pissarro's Paysage a Eragny is an ashstorm of colour, a Paddle Pop palette actually.

Cezanne is eternity, stillicide, perfect poise, sculptural repose. His Pommes et oranges: rosy lustre, preternaturally blushed, solid, burnished, statuesque. The large boarish woman in the blue dress, La femme a la cafetiere, rivals Jeanne Hebuterne for inexplicable beauty, a freakish aesthetic. Renoir makes cellulite look beautiful - his bathers, gloriously pudgy, wobbly at the waist, decadently lounging on the grass.

I must revise my opinion of Mondrian. An exposition of his early work contains one gem: Bois pres d'Oele, a Munchian suffusion of sunlight through foliage, recklessly daubed in purple, yellow, turquoise, orange.

2002-07-14T12:39:00.000-04:00

Selected excerpts, clipped for concision but otherwise untampered with.
03.07.02 Mercredi: Il pleut.
Back at the self-service laverie around the corner; reading Hazlitt's On Reading Old Books while my clothes are spun around.

Second time at Bouillon Racine. I have the foies de volaille aux olives et taboule this time, precisely cooked, and 140 (+/-10) moules en bouillon de curry doux and frites - smaller, more slippery and lubricious, sweeter than the first time.

Le Quartier Latin, disconsolate and desolate art-house cinema off rue des Ecoles, is showing Bunuel's L'Ange Exterminateur. Contrary to baseless preconceptions, the seats are very comfortable, velvet-rope red plushness. But the walls are a lustrous blue with gold gilt; pair of cherubs apparelled in false burnish looking positively fiendish planted in the wings; large lotus-lights; simulacrum of Dutch/Flemish religious painting (Van der Weyden?), gaudily framed prints of august anonymous personages - the perplexing mise en scene of Tales from the Crypt. Something quite sinister is about to happen. There are a total of about seven patrons in the cinema. Sepulchral silence, not even the ambient hush of air-conditioning. Spectators to a stage which is uncannily appropriate to the film - florid accents and decor which bespeak facile glamour, mimicry, sham and semblance, cheap baubles with false glitter.

L'Ange is in Spanish with French sous-titres. It is a genuinely discomposing experience; to be made to feel a child, to grope through mechanically and cumbrously even the simplest and most perfunctory dialogue. Visually however the circumstances have all the comic, absurd deliberateness of a mime, actions and gesticulations elastically stretched and distended - wan women of delicate constitutions languishing and expiring, supplicants in hasty prayer, superstitious simpletons clutching colourful charms, people eating paper and plaster off the walls, "il n'y a plus du cafe?" intoned in a petulant whimper, desperates thronging to glean water from a water-pipe which bursts while they are trying to hack a path through from the inside; silly altercations, fraying composures, stunning circularity, the grotesquerie of self-incarceration, histrionic exasperation, a pretty predicament.

2002-06-16T04:01:00.000-04:00

Our previous convivial-cycle having been forsaken, W, H, L and I finally regroup for the first time in at least six months. L, nothing if not well-shod, is wearing woven heels which make crumpled squeaks with each step. It is skin-flaying at first, but I slowly become inured to the noise. We promenade down to One Fullerton. I cannot help thinking Waterloo Sunset ("dirty old river/must you keep rolling/rolling into the night/people so busy/make me feel dizzy/taxi lights shine so bright"), but this is another milieu entirely, engineered to complex specifications. Our urban dichotomies are no longer as distinct as concrete jungle vs. green-belt/space, frenzy vs. tranquility. The tension no longer consists in infrastructural sprawl encroaching on the preserves of feral Nature. We now demand an extrapolation of Fallingwater, a seamless integration of the wrought and the elemental. But there is Junkspace everywhere threatening to annex the entirety of our built landscape. Shining example: the polished subterranean sterility of the underpass linking the Fullerton and One Fullerton. It is a horrendous vacancy, a strictly utilitarian structure stylised for its own sake. Automatic travellators which move slower than even the pace of an ancient crone. The One Fullerton stretch itself, however, is Boat Quay all grown up and gentrified (if that word even carries legitimate meaning anymore), a waterfront runway of subtle bustle and balmy calm. Commercial coffee-franchise and steakhouse nestle amid destination dining and clubbing. High-toned socialites poise themselves appropriately at the pierside/Pierside tables. Extended families stroll along, watching the ships go by, oblivious to the teeming droves of fashionistas and gastronauts reposing in their not-so-exclusive domain (neo-socialist state that we are, delineations of class, territorial or otherwise, are next to nonexistent): Embargo, incandescent lights murmuring in the dark, lustrous surfaces, ergonomic sofas. But they too have made the concession to unabashed pop culture: screening the World Cup.

We settle on Pierside. Sipping iced water while seated outside (preprandial cocktail menu is too extensive), awaiting the conclusion of a private function. At some point I swear the soundtrack to a nature documentary started playing. Then it segued, possibly hugely embarrassed, into the usual "chillout" aural wallpaper which everyone is so fond of nowadays. Bar-snacks: saucisson with mustard (turgid), cumin-spiced crab rolls (glorified spring rolls, but very good). We devour three (two repeat-requests) large homemade loaves of ciabatta with three deceptively austere-looking condiments: basil cream cheese, olive oil, sea salt. My potato-crusted Chilean seabass with blue crab broth and clams is another triumph. Silky and delicate, as lubricious as cod but with a purer texture, wrapped tightly in crispy tuber-tendrils, sitting on a clambankment. L's wild mushroom risotto is eagerly anticipated (only by myself) after previous proven glory of squid ink version, but it disappoints. Still, this mild excitement is nothing compared to the wildly throbbing prospect of being able to taste the legendary basil crepes with banana (they refused to show when I was here last), which J proclaimed possibly the best dessert ever! I regret to report that it was merely excellent. I am beginning, I think, to be stupefied by the uniformly awesome magic of desserts which seem to be everywhere. Either that or my sweet teeth are not acute enough to tell the difference.

The usual desultory roving and chronic indecision after dinner. Embargo on Embargo and similar outfits because we have had enough of being sedentary. I spot H's feet itching to get their groove on. Following a round of fruitless ferreting, L departs in her usual fashion, and the three left behind end up at a louche KTV lounge which should have a documentary made about it. This really is sleazy Singapore. It is the absolute nadir of crassness. It looks like a remaindered piece of Bugis Street at its lurid height, except that you wouldn't find framed and spotlighted replicas of the Mona Lisa and Van Gogh's Sunflowers in reality. I have previously avowed never to squander my time and money at such an establishment ever again, but this time I gave in, and I feel perversely compelled to return. It will assuredly unsettle all your notions of what it means to "have no taste". Beyond a certain point, undercurrents of the surreal begin to intervene. Your sensibilities are so utterly revolted that no measured, rational response is possible. If we had not been outrageously charged $10 for the compulsory bowl of canned longans, bringing me back to the real world of commercial skulduggery and sneakily tacked-on cutthroat charges, I might have been lost in la-la land forever.

2002-06-14T09:37:00.000-04:00

Potential attractions of Iceland (in descending order)
1. Whale sashimi
2. Reindeer-riding
3. Large smörgåsbord of Nordic wildlife: elk, moose, puffin, walrus
4. Glacier-abseiling
5. Seal-petting

Nasi padang lunch with S, L, E and J at Hotel Rendezvous. Prices inflated, and I am anxious that the heyday home-cooked goodness and glamour of an erstwhile era has vanished. Beef rendang too salty, sambal telur insipid, kangkong agreeably crunchy. S, E and J cannot recall having autographed the bra. Later I am shown a treasure by L at a secondhand bookshop in Bras Basah Complex. It is beautiful, but astonishingly useless: a Dutch-Japanese dictionary. Scouring the shelves, I disinter monographs on Qi Baishi (Union), Schiele (Popular) and "Modern Art" (Book Off). I would like also a copy of Harvard Design School's Project on the City 2, featuring Rem Koolhaas' giddy, logorrhoeic ramble on the death of design, Junkspace, but it really is too heavy to read safely without spraining a wrist, too expensive ($89.90 at Indian-run graphic book shop; however, perhaps I can spend a few otiose afternoons aslant on my favourite chair at Space perusing their browsing copy); and besides I have already found an online version.

2002-06-12T09:21:00.000-04:00

Think at last
We have not reached conclusion, when I
Stiffen in a rented house.
...
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
...
Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
-T.S. Eliot, Gerontion

Having blundered through these two and a half years with near-perfect emotional detachment, my response on leaving camp for the last time is remarkably uncomplex, and expectedly bleak: a torpid vacancy finally dissipated, a stupor dispelled, a somnambulist snapping out of it, jumping up and ruffling his hair, a player dismissed from the charade, as the backdrop and properties creak and crumble (weather was instrumental to staging: scattered leaves whirling in the wind, rainclouds coagulating menacingly, portentous thunderclaps reverberating throughout the theatre). G wraps it up with absolute poise and cordiality, plays the game right through to its whimpering conclusion, while I stutter and stumble through the formalities, staunchly laconic to the end. I had not even the pensiveness which one expects would be appropriate on just such an occasion as I tottered along with lopsided gait, lugging back helmet, SBO, bloated field pack, the works. I would recount those moments (not as few as you'd think) when I voluntarily suspended the persona for the people who mattered, but, as usual, my memory is treacherously selective.

2002-06-11T11:54:00.000-04:00

H was robbed by a crockery-crook while unattended at table! That dastardly daisy! And about Saint Pierre: it's a tired neo-fusion stunt, aflutter with vain flourishes and candy-bright party-favours, patronised by conspicuously silly cows who audibly and pointedly announce to everyone within earshot that they attended the film festival. Emmanuel is a slightly loony enfant terrible lionised on account of outlandish novelties and a reckless culinary adventurism, Edina a graceless ditz of a socialite, a darling flake. I must revisit to gather grist for the caustic re-review which I have been contemplating. Issued warm recommendations and grave warnings to H re: Silk Road...Snowflake must try, dao1 xiao1 mian4 like congealed ectoplasm, zha4 jiang4 mian4 soupy. Feeling rash and garrulous, I paint Prague as cohabitation and copulation haven for Yale homosexuals, to be rebuked rather rationally by Y. I feel I must be forgiven, for the only specific and memorable depiction of Prague I have encountered is Philip Roth's The Prague Orgy.

"But this is a classless society," she says. "This is socialism. What good is socialism if when I want to nobody will fuck me? All the great international figures come to Prague to see our oppression, but none of them will ever fuck me. Why is that? Sartre was here and he would not fuck me. Simone de Beauvoir came with him and she would not fuck me. Heinrich Böll, Carlos Fuentes, Graham Greene - and none of them will fuck me. Now you, and it is the same thing. You think to sign a petition will save Czechoslovakia, but what will save Czechoslovakia would be to fuck Olga."

Grilled fennel/radicchio a pleasure, other verdures a little arid and devitalised. Penne alla polpa di granchio pleasant but not quite up to snuff. Brownie and pistachio gelato excellent. Tiramisu was not its usual delectable self. Coffee arrived prematurely. Waiter harried and brusque. Perhaps it's this buy-3-get-1-free deal that's responsible for this tardiness. En route to languishing Salut, The Eighties Woman shimmies past us, in her customary white pumps and retro bowl-bob hairdo! Y thinks she looks like a Metro salesgirl; all heartily concur. In and out of Savoir-subordinate Baker's Inn (horrible sour-creamed pasta, no lemon tart, no apple-pistachio-lime [but this is moot; why can't I remember] cake) and on to Millenia Walk's magical-macaroon-factory Baker's Inn. We snap up the last two lemon tarts. The meringue squidges have been disswirled, and they taste of marshmallows. Y says lemon-gouache is too granular, but that is precisely its attraction! H's Gran Couva has a mini-macaroon perched on top and another ensconced within. Then, still unsated, he devours an ill-named brioche with warm creamy egg-mulch and Parma ham.

2002-06-06T06:13:00.000-04:00

Some enchanted evening. Lumbered alcove with plush plenitude of cushions, truncated table, pendulous lamp of self-variable radiance; overhead, a sonic-shaft for eavesdropping on neighbours. Preliminary "bar-snack": toasted gingko nuts, shells fractured for our convenience. Pleasantly acrid, although an unfortunate minority of errant nuts tasted of mussels and charcoal. Cold tofu, century egg and wakame salad, a quivering silken shape strewn with dark debris, encircled by fluttery greens wet with sesame oil and soya sauce (and maybe mirin?). Duck, breast of, smoked: more east than west, beautifully blushed. Chicken, thigh of, boneless, aromatically roasted; beef, grass-fed, steak of, medium-medium: both done to a turn.

Price of desserts has risen by a third. Boysenberry terrine in place of blueberry cheese tart. Baked tau-huay crowned with bread-crusts in place of bread-and-butter pudding. Erroneous taxonomy in menu cozens diner into expecting something fairly routine, then the surprise of the unannounced modification is sprung with full force. A dishonest tactic, but astonishingly effective. Poached pear too large and therefore disrespectful of hierarchy; ginger pudding with toffee sauce sublime as usual. A deliriously stupid person in the first alcove on the left loudly averred that nothing was easier than poaching a pear: "just boil it in water". Even a boiled egg, done to various stages of coalescence for various purposes, is notoriously difficult to perfect.

Shocking appearance of G, who came to dine with a person I only now retroactively recognise as D, his ex-conscript-colleague, from a year ago; before this glimpse of truth is allowed to me, we (persons at my table) had to hazard various hazy conjectures: might he be DL (the resemblance is more uncanny than usual, more than all those times when you drew a spurious connection just to impress your companions), whom L knows and did BMT with, although that G would know DL is unlikely even though he (DL) lived one floor up from G for close to three months. Ah, but might he not then be DL's brother? This is classed initially as fairly plausible. We thought ourselves vindicated when, eavesdropping helplessly on the adjoining chamber, we heard DL's first name mentioned. Surely this is the clincher then? It would be, had the-D-in-DL not, by a further sinister ripple of coincidence, also been the name (albeit a variant spelling) of G's and D's former department head, a phonetic-D-in-DL whom J also knows from his senior-class. However, only I am cognisant of all the discrete pieces of the puzzle, and have triumphantly solved the mystery.

Deformity to Anthropomorphology: An Introduction to Peanut Sculpture. Some of the most precious pieces in the collection have been damaged by damp, carelessly handled and dropped into water glasses, but the majority are still available for viewing at the Kacang Conservatory. All the installations are interactive, and alterations are encouraged, although the artists request that there be no carnal dealings or politically-inflammatory intercourse between person and peanut.

Brief exposition of exhibits:
Our star attraction, designed by Philippe Starck, is a writhing, disemboweled elver, freeze-framed and aged 1,000 years. Several pieces of Inuit art, imitation Easter Island statuettes, miniature Fabergé-style thrones and rollercoaster cars complete with shelled-peanut queen- or passenger-dolls, Wiener Werkstätte moccasins and clogs, delineations of sexual positions from the Kama Sutra, South Park action figures (the whole set was destroyed by a flood: only Kenny survived, as expected.)

2002-06-03T11:59:00.000-04:00

Another priceless piece disinterred and preserved. Other persons present: L, J & J.

Paolo & Ping's, c. 1998

1. Entrance is pleasurable to behold; possesses correct influences.
2. Olive oil bottle lacks womanly curves; this will displease Oedipal customers.
3. Minimalist candle is self-defeating and dissonant with surroundings.
4. Yellow lights in semi-Chinese establishment suggest racist opinions.
5. Noisy traffic passing by premises cannot be heard. This is good.
6. The intercurrents of air are harmonious and recommend themselves gently to our senses.
7. Retail corner is vulgar and emanates an unwholesome presence replete with indolent propensities.
8. The waitresses' faux-cheongsam tops with obscene décolletages are offensive to the moral sensibilities of conservative Chinese diners. Moreover, they (the waitresses) lack the seasonings of insouciance to carry it off.
9. Attempt to blend Sino-Italian into an agreeable mélange results in a confused puddle of miry, dissociated scallops and petrified mozzarella.
10. Music no good.
...and who is that familiar-looking lady over there?

2002-06-02T01:53:00.000-04:00

1st of June. Adam Road hawker centre rewelcomes eager habitués after lengthy renovation. Doughnut-shaped seating area thronging with convocations of senior citizens (one leg vertically-akimbo, like a chicken wing precisely poised, on the citrus-coloured furniture; past repast before them, landfills of disembodied cockle- and clam-shells), au fait expatriates, bewildered tourists, healthy nuclear-family foursomes. In the centre, gazebo-dining, stupidly sheltered by large umbrellas from the skylight which is there to beautify!

Half the tenants sell the same things: I was not aware that this was an Islamic-gastronomic ghetto. Embittered fruit-juice factions, situated next to each other, jostle and clamour for patronage. If you do not buy from the one on the right, a horrible weaselly old man shoots looks of extreme rancour in your direction every five minutes. On this occasion Mrs. Weasel joined the heckling campaign by "accidentally" spilling green apple froth-and-juice down my back. Forgotten stingray order inflamed already fraying nerves. The rojak stall is a fraudulent establishment; there was no mango in the mango rojak. Hokkien mee was guilty of three misdemeanours. In descending order of uncountenanceability:

1. Wrong type of chilli
2. Use of chu1 mi3 fen3
3. Discoloured crab-sticks

2002-05-31T12:00:00.000-04:00

He fully understood all this, but, like a man unable to resist arguing with a hallucination, even though he knows perfectly well that the entire masquerade is staged in his own brain, Cincinnatus tried in vain to out-wrangle his fear, despite his understanding that he ought actually to rejoice at the awakening whose proximity was presaged by barely noticeable phenomena, by the peculiar effects on everyday implements, by a certain general instability, by a certain flaw in all visible matter - but the sun was still realistic, the world still held together, objects still observed an outward propriety.
-Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

2002-05-31T09:16:00.000-04:00

E, J & J: what is this doing in My Documents? You haven't received copies because the printer's down, and the Word on the other computer is unregistered and acting petulant lately.

20, May, 2002

Amuse-bouche: Black olives, self-stuffed with pinenuts & basil

Camembert, undergone heat treatment, will last until next year, it doesn’t even look as if it will last another hour. Camembert with crispbread, fig and ginger, not all that crisp, these don’t last either?

It is evanescent; will exit your colon within a day. But it will persist in your memory.

You can’t write standing up, on a flat keyboard. It’s just too hard, really. I’m not kidding. It is. All these things you should know.

Something just came to mind... keep it coming out of the bronze spouts. It’s even harder to write now, now that I can’t see the keyboard, and Buddha is here to look at what I’m writing, looking over my shoulder, now he’s chuckling, and breathing on my neck, and failing to start, and the candle flame on my left and he’s tapping my shoulder, and the lamp too bright on my right. Stroked by Buddha’s hand! Hope it gives me good luck in mahjongg.

2002-05-30T08:55:00.000-04:00

Spaghetti aglio olio with shallots, olives and pine-nuts.

I have vanquished blandness. It is a simple matter. Salt the pasta-cooking water with a solemn deportment, as if you were scattering the ashes of a venerable relation into the Aegean Sea. Do not be stingy. Let yourself go. All those myths of hypertension and heart disease are merely scare-tactics, propagated by ascetic nutritionists in order to deflect you from the full enjoyment of your food.

The same with the oil. Olive oil is a wondrous essence, divinity liquefied. Decant a generous amount into the water to prevent the troublesome coherence of floury surfaces, which will be the ruin of your dish. Glug, glug, glug. The best olive oils have a virile and aggressive sunned scent. They should be robust enough to retain their prominence when mingled with other flavours, all of which are competing for the diner's limited palatention.

As for the shallots, see that they do not scorch. Startle them with a fierce flame, and they will soon shrivel to death. Pine-nuts tan easily, especially when you are not looking. On no account should you allow a single immoderately-browned kernel to remain in the mix. Olives are resilient materials and will survive most manhandlings.

What exactly is "al dente"? Standards differ considerably; some desire the contumacy of old sea-coconut, others the pliancy of boiled worms. It is up to you. Drain noodles and combine with oiled ingredients. Then, more oil and more salt. You are allowed this recklessness because you have denied yourself the more extravagant garnishes. Toss through, insouciantly, and serve.

2002-05-28T02:29:00.000-04:00

Deserving Passengers. By Amanda Perkins. Harper-Collins; 457 pages; $19.95.

Ms Perkins' second effort, after her religio-political parable debut Maximum Height Clearance, is a spellbindingly inspirational work which should be made mandatory reading in schools. In the honoured tradition of Paulo Coelho, she soothes the soul with tranquil tales of self-discovery, spiritual nourishment and comfort. Written in a no-nonsense, straightforward style overflowing with a touching sincerity, Passengers is aflower with precious nuggets of homely wisdom, golden tenets for our cynical age. This is the sort of honest anodyne we so desperately need to counteract the degenerate and abstruse ramblings of "high art"; something readily assimilated, meaningful and life-enhancing.

Amanda Perkins is a writer of that most contemptible variety: a parochial, pseudo-spiritual guru, a market-square mountebank, who peddles shabby self-help charms and tarnished talismans promising instant faith and mystic direction. The usual vehicle is the picaresque parable, populated by:
1. Sagacious personages who send the protagonist on perilous errands, during which said hero embarks on a parallel voyage of inner discovery;
2. "Chance" encounters with cripples and mendicants spouting cryptic advice;
3. An element of adversity (fearsome monsters, bandits swathed in flowing cloths, large-breasted temptresses, spectre of protagonist's past);
4. The insinuating, allusive presence of God (Julian Barnes in Flaubert's Parrot: "the bearded head gardener who is always tending the apple tree; the wise old sea-captain who never rushes to judgment; the character you're not quite introduced to, but who is giving you a creepy feeling by Chapter Four").
I wish Ms Perkins all future success. Doubtless she will continue to attract legions of adoring fans and credulous fools who will be profoundly touched by her visionary work.

No, I don't like this one at all. There is no gratuitous sex or violence, none whatsoever. It's just far too dull. Perhaps a few swashbuckling scenes of monster-slaying or some riveting political intrigue might save it. All the characters seem too implausibly well-behaved. We need something with broader market appeal, but still artistically interesting. Diaries of rape victims, for instance, or a lesbian romance.

2002-05-25T22:52:00.000-04:00

Disenchanted Repartee

A: May I sit on your head?
B: No, I do not like grapefruit.
A: I enjoy hunting moose in Nova Scotia.
B: Only if the villagers are wearing breeches.
A: But isn't it closed on Thursdays?
B: Am I not larger than a poodle?
A: Depending on my liver condition.
B: I'm afraid we have run out of sealing-wax.
A: Someone has broken into my nettle-plantation!
B: My nephew has returned from exile in Odessa!
A: It snowed yesterday.
B: You are an imposter!
A: Do you have this in magenta?
B: Please use the coasters.

2002-05-25T02:19:00.000-04:00

A large vitreous vessel in which artichokes fester, thereby acquiring all sorts of gripping flavours: ditchwater, sweaty socks, acrylic. A treacherous tongue-slaying pearl-onion, loaded with vinegar and possibly vitriol. An archaeological treasure: dairy-granite, crumbling corpse of milk. A Cubist Caprese. Straggly salame thickly woven with fat (hog with halitosis, snouting down my throat). Placid Prosciutto, with a sweeter and more diffident odour, deftly carved, to be paired with: parched pulp of eggplant, a mouthful of loamy loveliness.

2002-05-17T05:37:00.000-04:00

One of those "delicious do-nothing" afternoons. I am poring over past correspondence (admiring chance cadences, the spirited loops and writhing strokes of unretouched handwriting), the chaotic scrawl of writing drafts (furiously and densely annotated; a stray beautiful thought being framed and shaped, fugitive impressions rescued and preserved). But also performance programmes, tickets, receipts...compulsively hoarding the accumulated detritus of my life, objets retrouvés, reclaimed beached treasures, shell necklaces, bottled ships, "the refuse of my profession" (Updike).

I need a fresh idiom, wafting forth exoticism and otherness. But not the bad-translation sort. Who should I attempt to imitate next?

2002-05-15T06:32:00.000-04:00

On Charm in Music

“Life is ridiculous; and that cannot be borne.” That, I vaguely recall, came either from Ibsen or one of his characters. Our time, frilled with vain frippery, plastic pop iconography, stupid notions of facile glamour, would have been simply insufferable from the outset, but for the unfortunate (and some would say ineluctable) fact that the number of persons paying subscription to the package is rather inordinate (but perhaps unsurprisingly so); and the dwindling demographic of sound-minded people, seeing no terribly excitable motivation to incite themselves into becoming valiant proselytisers, have reduced all their potential opposition to lackadaisical, faintly pejorative phrases: “vulgar”, “crass”, “maudlin”, “schmaltzy”. Absurdity has become a monstrous fashion, an insidousness artfully wrapped in the latest brand of glitter and passed off as irony, burlesque and quirkdom. The revulsion we ought to feel and do not has become an alien reaction. Decorum, propriety, rectitude – archaisms which most would have only a fading recollection of from some Jane Austen drawing-room drama, popularly regarded as the queer and pitiable result of Victorian repression. We have lost our capacity to be scandalised; consequently, it is an accordingly difficult effort for us to become animated by the impulsions of passion, or stirred by the tenacity of conviction. Disaffection is the new heroic mode.

2002-05-13T10:06:00.000-04:00

Half-delirious, I finally locate a copy of Zhang Daqian's dual-language treatise on Chinese brush painting at Kinokuniya. The English half has that elliptical, overwrought and awkward charm which blooms only rarely, in what would strictly be considered inept translations. The rendering into an alien tongue of an allusive texture, a linguistic quiddity, an idiom weighted with folklore, a metaphor attuned to a native music, is almost never accomplished with both grace and fidelity, especially with two languages as temperamentally and semantically opposed as English and Chinese...but I revel secretly in the translator's gaffes. Of fish ZDQ writes (or is rendered as having written):

The secret of painting fish lies in the painter's ability to express the fishy gladness and freedom of motion in water. If the fish should appear to be out of water, so to speak, that would be tantamount to divorcing it from its natural instinct. The test of the painter's finesse is in the art of showing aquatic presence in the feeling and attitude of the fish, without having to delineate water.

Elsewhere the translator tries for grandiloquence and unwittingly ends up with burlesque:

Blessed with majestic elegance and splendour, the peony is hailed as the queen of all flowers, the reigning beauty of celestial fragrance. Hence, in the elaborate style of painting, it may be regarded as the representative of the floral kingdom.

What is that magical modulation? A clumsy tumble; a cadence which often shrieks but sometimes sings, resounding above the humdrum vernacular we have become dulled to.

2002-05-05T02:37:00.000-04:00

Shunning the well-trodden standard-issue freebies which grace the tables of Chinese restaurants (braised groundnuts, Sichuan kiam chye, artless attempts at achar), Silk Road proffers a dish of alien apostasy and faerie-delicacie; a finely-brined and nicely-diced mirepoix of tantalisingly toothy vegetables, steeped in a secret, seductive potion; cavorting coyly with the tastebuds, a temptress feisty and forthright, voluptuous and vitalising.

XLB plump and meaty, strong on the ginger, beautifully clammy-skinned, but on the whole still lacking the incendiary succulence of CJLMXLB's rendition (although, on occasion, one wishes that the latter were a little less floppy, poodle-eared, Persistence-Of-Memory Daliquescent). But the divinest dumpling was definitely the "Snowflake" Jiaozi, briefly browned, lewdly lubricated, stuffed with pork, jiu3 cai4 and an inspired whiff of aniseed/liquorice/Pernod. And on top of them rested an ethereal popiah-skin-"snowflake", tenuous and tremulous: a virginal veil of pre-nuptial modesty, or naughty edible lingerie to encourage gastronomic foreplay? Never were the "pleasures of the table" so archly ceremonious...

2002-05-02T07:56:00.000-04:00

I've run dry (well, not really. But I can't possibly publish every last piece of doggerel I have, can I? Certainly not for free, anyway). I am sick of this blog. I have been reduced to going ice-skating in order to amuse myself.

It is downright dispiriting to have to write in the wake of giant predecessors. Borges: "The certainty that everything has been already written nullifies or makes phantoms of us all." If every aspiring writer were told that he must compete directly with the literary personages of the past, we should not have half so many complacent mediocrities clamouring for our attention and approval with trivial topicalities.

Was reading the Strong Opinions of Nabokov at Borders. That was a flagrant paraphrase.

Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote it and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.
Virginia Woolf, Orlando

2002-04-28T05:58:00.000-04:00

I can't get enough of this! The mirage in the mirror, a simulacrum twice reflected back at you...am I alone in thinking this a hilarious exercise? In Life! today: Gopal Baratham: "You must write for an audience. Writing for yourself is masturbation." Poppycock. Nabokov: "There can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art."

Now for more wanking...these are the first two paragraphs of a work of agitprop which I've been coerced into writing for my platoon yearbook (well, actually there is some sort of under-the-table recompense: more off-passes. Shhh...), Spanished and reEnglished.

The history of the human effort is left in disorder with cases of initiating dangerous. The first man, delirious with the hunger and fact in front with options that have supper limited, that was quite imprudent to swallow one ostra crude. Heretics. of the reform. Huss, Luther, Calvin. who, in an intense age of spirituality of doctrinaire, had the conviction to oppose a social structure monolithic and hardened as the catholic church, and the value of holding the persecution that happened. The states based on the satellites of the ex-ones, derrelicto and alienated seriously after the demonstrated lack of seven decades of social engineering, the economic aid puppetry and artificial policy, doing the onerous attempt to reintegrate they themselves in a system of the capitalist. In any revolutionary company, the success must fortitude, persistence, tenacity, fearlessness, vision. Perhaps all the essential qualities, no doubt, but we report out of proportion of the credit to those huge abstractions, and discounted the importance of the worldly servitude, without which those high qualities are in useless. The reconstruction of history is often a dishonest business. Evident those in favor will lustrarán inevitable on the trivialities, embellish the daily routine prosaic and the boredom, will omit the attractiveness little and the disagreeable one, in a supply to dramatize and will be glorified. It is rarely a conscious manufacture nevertheless, and quite often the result of a natural romantic propensity. The stories of the fabulous heroísmo and the fabulous danger sing in the memory; the faithful but sober accounts of the boring work no.

2002-04-27T13:03:00.000-04:00

E. just gave me the address of this fabulous online translation device. You will, of course, excuse the protracted joke which follows. It's something I wrote (in English, just in case this is unclear), had translated by aforementioned translator into French, and then re-translated back into English. Enjoy.

26th DEC 2000
Pierre saint - scintillatingly the white, ensconced without risk at the end of A cloistered the cul-de-sac in the generally abandoned central mall. Maintaining the last thing that we have need is another lesson in the undervaluation or the minimalism of ' Zen '. Saint Pierre manages (but only narrowly) to escape criticism on this account. Getups superfluity, a functional sensitivity modernist with lighting very full with spirit (which I will not damage while tracing here), and the floor of parquet floor of tan did not polish with a raised gloss, réminiscent these Scandinavian über-concessions of supply. It is not any attempt calculated to submit the report/ratio simply; it is a total negligence for any embellissement unspecified. It is anti-decoration, or perhaps to the top moreover more exactly, a-decoration, faithful to the original creed modernist - but always finishes looking at very smart and neat indeed.

To 7,15 we were the first customers. Executive head Emmanuel Stroobant, a Belgian convivial pushing the tufts ice-blondes on her head, accomodated us personally and given us to it finely to read attentively. "it smiles too much," Y. laughed with Darcy-like the disdain, as if it were the first sign déclinable of the evening. Personally, I think us could do everything with an attention little more personal and less prepared officiousness - if all does not have any reason, I will say to you.

The chart was very attractive, with a tasting of seven-course for $85, and of the seven varieties more still of the fats of liver on sale, more risibly the weak one of what was a salad of Caesar with let us croûtons of liver. The remainder of the menu was a traditional French conflation ordered and New-Japonisme art (the aileron of century to reproduce, and to recall is not to it however the new century) - very Toulouse-Lautrec, if you will excuse the impression. I always wondered whether the French and the Japanese do one appareillement by the way - old August and will bravura, last voce austere and of sotto. The Eastern inflections did not look at too importunate here (I spoke too early, naturally; they serve the eel green-tea-green-tea-smoked now) - a gloss of miso, the crab salad of snow - which made the place resemble a positive sanatorium after my trauma preceding of fusion.

It did not begin well. The bread, a turgid and ventilated phallus, a reproduction high pressure die casting by diminutive of a rod, was completely feeling reluctant. Our mouths only had fun enough by a breaded snail nested in the depression of a Chinese soup spoon filled with seasoned grass emulsion, and an indefinable settee comprising certain pie and aspic in the alternate layers.

The J, in the test at the Stroobant place, only could control the "membre Scandinavian band of rock ". I usefully suggested Michael learns how to rock. And then there were the usual jokes about the famous Belgians. Between we let us can only control three - and two of them were fictitious (Rene Magritte, Hercules Poirot and Tintin).

To start, I had desiccated fats of liver with the French toast caramelized and the cutters (sic) fork-crushed acid. I can not to recall how I have chosen that surplus other variations, but I know that I was not helped by "the assistance" (how they specifically asked to be addressed in the menu), a fey, rather young woman with the carefree hairdo which gave me a lesson not requested on balance contrapuntal in dishes of fat of liver - softness to the rough taste with round in addition to richness unctuous. At all events, it very nice and well-was conceived, unless I found my cutters to be completely intact; no obviousness of them having been not pummelled by any instrument unspecified.

The Y. had the pot of fat of liver with crawfish ravioli (at the origin the gyoza of frog thigh, but was to him in addition to menu), fighting to remain with flood on a flood of Japanese wild mushroom cream. It could as well have been mushroom ragoût furnished with pie and a pellet. Its only response to our blandishments was "excellent" clearly. The J confronted large, punt Japanese slate of yellow tuna of Tartar aileron and fresh sashimi of festoon with lawyer and the salad of wakame, the single concession of Stroobant with unalloyed the Japanese composition. It was in a French indisputable way in the presentation, however, with all the necessary size and drama - a feeler rather threatening of crawfish placed in a tuna hillock making a wild and strident arc which was more invahissant that is usually considered polished; the generous and "random" stews of the lawyer splodge and the alga slightly verdant, like the painting of impasto of Van Gogh' S, applied directly to the fabric.

"it looks at a little occupied," I averred.

"do not destroy it with your words," the evil squeaked J. In fact, it was completely of festival (it pink dark of rare tuna, in.liaison.with the duelles nuances of the green) and could have made perfect cynosure and riotous for the dinner of Christmas.

We had a very good sight of the kitchen. Stroobant acted like a surgeon who carried out each other operation on the liver of a duck, each one preceded by an advertisement of the identity by the patient (I want to say the subject). It was all the very sharp one, and completely frankly, private clinic - in particular in the literal direction. I would like to see it that the resuscitate has well wafer of cooked fats of liver.

After a intermezzo of mango sorbet and a little waiting, our principal dishes arrived, supported by a androgynoid of statuesque (which, us later discovered, times as bitch of door to a certain club). I slow- had roasted salmon trout ("a trout, not a salmon "- Stroobant) with mushroom of portobello, the crusty prosciutto and mirin-infused octopus. Resting in a bisque robust-seasoned and surrounded by A ratatouille-like the mixture of the food roots of root, it was completely superb, except that I could not find any octopus. Ah, idiot I. "you remember to eat something of crusty on trout?" Yes, bacon - oops, prosciutto - was little "not, there those finely-julienned of the bands, like fried shallots? It is your octopus." The menu was simply classist, or less very compromised. The humble veggies which constituted at least a third of the dish did not even justify a mention, but the invisible unfair suspicion of octopus "infused" (probably suggestive of a magic alchemical process) with exotic Japanese rice wine is scandalously announced. Cheap discrimination.

The J savoured "a medium-rare ox net wrapped out of bacon, of rubbed with rock salt, a galze of teriyaki, scented the oil of cilantro" and from the Dauphine of gratin, which seemed like a freebie with us - a little prolix for a beefsteak. The Y. ordered, rather blind, the net of Saint-Pierre with crushed almonds, the braised asparagus and the enoki spread in a soup of dashi. the "mackerel in the taste, John Dory in texture," it endangered (and completely exactly, too). Ask the assistance, I suggested, although I informed it that it could simply state the obviously obvious fact in oneself, "is a fish". I was right. Or at least, such were its first exact words. Only one tight time it indicated that Saint Pierre is John Dory, and also a place in France.

For the dessert, I took pudding sticking of date with sauce to caramel with butter - a remainder of old finely of fig sheet - which was a candy with little but always completely pleasant. The Y. took a receipt of family (suggestive of the exalted, hermetic secret configuration of the ingredients) - Belgian cake chocolate flourless of Grandma Stroobant with the raspberry purées which looked at little too innofensif. Little too likes a "brownie", in fact. There did not make any attempt defend the clothes industry, and remained stolid as always.

Burned frozen of cream of sweet chestnut of the J with vanilla bourbons (sic still) was a terrible nuance of gray-ochre. It tasted like what to be it claimed, but to be a little flask and moussey, and solved with the not identified particles. It had courage to call it disabled person, a pun of which I really laughed. But where those the "bourbons" odd-are called? Bourbon-infused candies? Probably the pieces, which, like my octopus, have pleasure to allure the dinner of beginner while playing where is Wally among the disorder of your dish.

The interesting cast iron of the "aide "is a definite attraction. Or distraction, if you are in this tilted way.

2002-04-26T12:58:00.000-04:00

Welcome. You are one of a group of about ten people chosen through a rigorous selection process to become privy to the material posted herewith. I apologise for the hermetic references and inside-jokes; however, I flatter myself that there will still be plenty to amuse and provoke you in spite of this. And yes, this is what I have been doing while marooned in camp.

'You provide desolation,' wrote George Sand, 'and I provide consolation.' To which Flaubert replied, 'I cannot change my eyes.' The work of art is a pyramid which stands in the desert, uselessly: jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it; continue this comparison. Do you want art to be a healer? Send for the Ambulance George Sand. Do you want art to tell the truth? Send for the Ambulance Flaubert: though don't be surprised, when it arrives, if it runs over your leg. Listen to Auden: 'Poetry makes nothing happen.' Do not imagine that Art is something which is designed to give gentle uplift and self-confidence. Art is not a brassière. At least, not in the English sense. But do not forget that brassière is the French for life-jacket.
Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

2002-04-26T05:01:00.000-04:00

L’Angélus

Triumvirate of triumvirates,
Steamed in sluggish sarcophagi.
Escargots embalmed in Provençal fluids,
Graves sealed with breadstones,
Porous crouton coffins.
Like sacrilegious gravediggers we
Ferreted and desecrated,
With crab-forks and tea-spoons,
Defiling the fragrant repose of slumbering snails.

(the spelunkers escape by sea)

Agglutinated protein, congealed
Goaty patties, corpses of milk
Affixed to an armada
Of triangular catamarans,
Circumnavigating a deluged arboretum.

Three wise men, frankly incensed, watch
Incredulously: seconded butter
Bearing Presidential insignia
(pluming itself on a borrowed escutcheon)
Commingles with virgin bread
In the manger.

A bolster of contumacious calf
Enshrooming frisky fromage:
A colonial travesty,
A roulade façade.

(meanwhile, Sir Francis Drake
steers an attendant gondola
of the Dauphin’s gratin)

Another drake’s noble self-immolation
Dans gras de lui-même,
To effect a gastrotransfiguration
Of the crème de la crème.

The crackle of transubstantiated fat
Raucously deliquescing in my
Copious saliva.

A shimmering suspension of
Summery splendour, studded
And bejeweled with acid pulp.

2002-04-26T04:56:00.000-04:00

Paladino. 23rd Feb. 2002, 7.20 p.m.

Waitership: Helpful but unintelligent.
Upholstery: Resplendent in monogrammed satin dress.
Tablecloths: Yes. Hazelnut.
Lighting: Austere, beguiling.
Glasses: Shapely and convivial.
Cutlery: Forks repose with prongs against the table. An emphatically European gesture?
Menu writing: Rife with subtle metonymy and royalist pretension; to wit: pieces of meat were “crowned”, desserts sat atop a “moat” of chocolate.

Amuse-bouche: Salmon and tuna mousse. Mulchy and dishearteningly buttery, but otherwise insipid. Recycled-paper-pulp would be a useful comparison.
Appetizer: Soft fritter of artichoke and mozzarella, tomato salsa, rocket salad. The salad was not rocket. The rest was what it said it was – and perhaps a bit less.
Palate-cleanser: Lemon sorbet. Of exceptional resilience and appropriate frigidity. Presumably the egg whites were fervently flagellated.
Main course: Marjoram flavoured pappardelle in duck ragu. Noodles were of especially slender girth, but otherwise sound. Disagreeably sticky and combatively salty.
Dessert: Distinctive Autumn pear cake with the unusual addition of chocolate and roasted almonds. Was neither distinctive nor a cake. Unusual only in its petite proportions. Tart (for this was what it was) pastry was crumbly and did not cleave cleanly.

A vast, vainglorious spectacle emblazoned with shimmering promise; lots to see but precious little to taste.

2002-04-26T04:46:00.000-04:00

7th April 2001

The dieponyms and proprietors of Da Paolo e Judie have erected a fulgent beacon of architectonic éclat, but inhabit the edifice as poltergeists would a decrepit tenement. Paolo Scarpa, master architect and éminence grise, wove fugitive and apparition-like, in and out of phantom passageways, now and then emerging, like a gopher, from out of (not behind) a wall, an illusionist’s cantrip aided perhaps by the tricky chiaroscuro interior; glassy, limpid panels astride flat black, chestnut and champagne surfaces.

(The washroom, a solipsistic surreal nightmare of infinite recursion. I found myself walled in self-reflexively by four mirrors, where walls were, having a urinal’s-eye-view of myself in the act.)

From the tenebrous pre- or post-prandial vestibule, the darkness rather sinisterly relieved by the single deathly pale orchid in ghostly vase, and a lucent vessel of brown sugar resting on each table (accoutrements for unspeakable occult rituals, atop a sacrificial altar?), we ambulated towards the bar counter, standing amidst a scintillating vacancy, all marbly and nacreous. In the dining room proper, half the surfaces gleam lewdly, their scandalous exposure abetted by too many upturned spotlights welded into the floor; the other half recede in bas-relief, owing to their flat muted hues.

Judie Scarpa (a renascent and vitalized Miss Havisham rising, freshly disinterred, nightly, to attend to guests who are very late for her ruined wedding), a handsome woman of burnished hue festooned with white drapery, hostess and impresario par excellence, a regular Clarissa Dalloway, made her rounds, flitting hither and thither, inquiring after everyone’s dining welfare with such amiable solicitude (unlike most obtrusive waitstaff who loudly demand your approbation every chance they get) that it was quite impossible not to be charmed. However, she had definite ideas about what her guests should eat (or should not eat, as evinced by her arch reaction to Y. having chosen to start with the gratinated mushrooms: “And how did you like that?” He countered with triumphant stoicism: “Very subtle”), going on a bit too long about the elusive appeal (which, presumably, would forever escape us Philistines) of J’s Tagliatelle In Salsa Reale, and giving us to understand that we had ordered badly, through her effusive exaltations of what we didn’t try.

That may possibly have been applicable to W., whose starter of prawns came atop a spectacularly huge hillock of polenta which no-one could reasonably be expected to put away (oh, but W. did, inexplicably). I, however, was not in the least convinced that my choices were in any way second-rate. To start, carpaccio di cappesante e funghi con rucola – a felicitous surf ‘n’ turf, mer et terre pairing of slivery seafaring scallops and their woodsy landlubbing confrères, with a sneaky strawberryish attack (a dash of fraises de bois?) Next, spaghetti alla Polesina, a delicious dalliance in my mouth: prawns, roasted red peppers, a “touch” of cream, white wine and garlic in a perfect meld. Utterly gorgeous. Finally, in spite (or perhaps because) of the none too inspiring recitation of the dessert specials by our lackadaisical waiter (“Today we have a black fig brioche. It’s like a pudding.” Note: J. is rather inimical towards puddings. Or should that be the other way round?), both Y. and I contrarily ordered profiterols al cioccolato. I thought them excellent, with a superior ganache centre, and blissfully free of that raw eggy flouriness which repels me from regular éclairs, but Y. was (unprecedentedly) falling over himself with giggling delight. My cappucino, sipped in the aforementioned sepulchre, was uncommonly good.

What was uncommonly bad was the cramped seating. The conversation at our table was taxing enough without my having to be distracted by the very engaging (and at that distance, loud) discussion going on to my right (I was pleased to find, however, that someone else thinks Marmalade is overrated). And the music veered wildly from string quartet (8pm) to silly technobabble (10pm). Fix that, Mrs Scarpa, and I’ll be sure to return. To try your amazing antipasto.

2002-04-26T04:37:00.000-04:00

Buko Nero/Spizza for Friends, 03.04.02

1. Duck liver crostini with coriander: good
2. Pineapple-grapefruit “welcome drink” (?): alright
3. Warm tofu and tomato salad, alfafa, coriander, tau yew: good but irrelevant
4. Seafood bisque thickened with egg white: bland, also incongruous
5. Pineapple jelly and lemon granita ...which it wasn’t
6. Risotto with gorgonzola and Thai basil: excellent
7. Fresh fruit sushi: honey mango, rock melon, strawberry; orange syrup: scandalously awful, “too challenging”, “Merilynesque”

I N T E R M I S S I O N

8. Hot apple tart (pie) with vanilla gelato: alright
9. Sweet pizza: melted chocolate, almond flakes, oranges: improved by the addition of olive oil. Not appreciated by anyone else, however.
10. Remaindered pizza dough, herb-infused olive oil: dinner, like life, and other sundry biological processes, is, or at least should be, cyclical. Begin the repast with the communal breaking of bread, the simple fruit of the earth, then sample the giddy lavishness of fancy creations, and to conclude the evening: can one, without severe self-recrimination, really force down yet another circulation-clogging Valrhona chocolate confection? Bread as valediction and sober reproof: scorn the sumptuousness of more richly laden tables; relish with thanksgiving everything austere, earthy, humble, life-enhancing, rather than the vain flourishes of florid imaginations. Food is sustenance merely, hedonism is heresy.

2002-04-26T04:30:00.000-04:00

"The pleasures of the table are for every man, of every land, and no matter of what place in history or society; they can be a part of all his other pleasures, and they last the longest, to console him when he has outlived the rest." – Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste

Few people I meet understand what the ‘pleasures of the table’ are, and my passion for them. Many think my fastidious concern with food is tantamount to gluttony, hedonism, and decadence. To these charges I will reply that I am not referring to (or obsessed with) the act of eating, which is simply the satisfaction of a carnal urge – no matter how acute the hunger, it is no more palliated by pâté de foie gras than a peanut butter sandwich. But appetite is not so easily mollified. Only through a rare conjunction of propitious circumstances – exquisite food, amenable surroundings, charming and congenial conversation, the thoughtful assembly of guests – is this mundane obligation to feed thus transfigured into an occasion for conviviality, for savoring food unharassed, for the indulgence of the senses. These other elements constitute an indispensable counterpoint, without which even the most meticulously composed meal would fail to satisfy. On the other hand, I recall with fondness occasions where amiable and sympathetic company more than amply compensated for dire food or clamorous surroundings. The pleasures of the table, then, are not strictly confined to the table, although it is usually around this centerpiece of social communion that they are most strikingly manifested. Such pleasures are simply that portion of the refinement and decorum of civilized living which is most closely allied with good food.

More than sybaritism or graciousness, however, an abiding concern with, and interest in, one’s food cultivates a sense of thanksgiving and contentment, and an appreciation for the natural, unadorned raw materials which comprise so much of our diet. There is much to admire in the subtle sorcery responsible for shaping those delicate filigreed desserts you had at that French restaurant last night, but also something far more awesomely organic in the heady bouquet of a fresh peach, or the primal, gratifying goodness of a baked potato.

And far more than any other avocation, the pleasures of the table outlast faddish thrills. There is the gentle tremulousness of eagerly anticipating the roast that will be the cynosure at dinner tonight, the lambent reminiscence of past culinary glories, the tantalizing, evocative prose of M. F. K. Fisher and Elizabeth David, which sustains the mental appetite when the physical one is languishing. When you finally lose the command and acuity of your other senses in the infirmity of senescence, the consolation of tasting – or of recalling having tasted – your cherished foods is often the last to forsake you.

2002-04-26T04:22:00.000-04:00

Nicholson Baker, The Fermata
No other writer has evinced so contradictory a response in me. Within the space of a single page I lurch from love to loathing, vacillating between an enraptured appreciation of joyous (and occasionally Joycean) wordplay (to wit: ‘literoti’, ‘prelewds’, ‘floptical jillusions’), and a heaving convulsion of disgusted contempt – at ludicrous accounts of covert cumshots, pubic topiaries resembling bicycle seats, extra-terrestrial bondage fantasies actualised in enormous electromagnetic contraptions. The morally repugnant and the downright ineffable are paraded about like Mardi Gras floats. No issue is too picayune to escape his unflinching scrutiny or his neurotic fixations. His writing is, I think, knowingly festooned with outrageous coinages. On the surface, such expression is indefensible, as far as delicacy, restraint or ‘artistic license’ is concerned. He is always brazen and unnerving, and also frequently absurd. With such characteristic phrases as ‘scream-cream’ and ‘burning bechamel’, he celebrates the lurid lexicon of pornography, tapping its bawdily comic, but also candidly sensuous, potential with such playful glee that even our soundest objections are coaxed into a helpless admiration of the beguiling qualities of his language.

It is, of course, extremely erudite pornography, with a keen sense of parody, and what Woolf called the ‘sublimely obscene’. At one point he chides Borges for a disappointingly unimaginative treatment of the proposition of temporal stasis in his story, The Secret Miracle. NB turns the whole premise of magic-fabulism and metaphysical speculation on its head, spurning the heavy-handedness to which the genre is prone, and fully mining it for the wild, questing, almost picaresque adventurism it implicitly entails.

(Niggling thought: why Lolita, so tenderly insinuating and tantalisingly tacit, was received the way it was, while this flagrant exhibition of sexual bravado and perversion met with unqualified praise, is quite baffling to me.)