In the spirit of New Year reflection and also in the spirit of Ferris Bueller,
I wanted to list my highlights of 2014. I often complain about not having time
for things or get hung up on the cliché of time moving too quickly. This list
is my bid to take a look around, albeit in retrospect; we can’t all be as zen
as Ferris Bueller.
As a disclaimer, I am aware that posts like this can be a bit self-indulgent. A
friend of mine recently posted a link to this spoof (?) blog post so I hope this doesn’t come across in the same way. I have stuck mainly to new
places visited and pop culture and left out some of the more personal stuff. This
is not a top ten; it is just ten.
Podcasts
There has been a lot written already about Sarah Koenig’s excellent Serial.
Like most
others, I really enjoyed Serial but don’t particularly want to add to the
multiple pieces that have already been written. (One thing I will say is that the SNL parody is hilarious).
Serial has been important to be because it has opened me up to the world of
podcasts and I am still only scratching the surface. Before 2014, I only
listened to This American Life and Marc Maron’s WTF,
but listening to Serial has been like receiving a very late invite to a
long-raging party.
I have been given similar invitations in the past but have never really
bothered to explore podcasts that much. Years ago, when having a coffee in Brooklyn, I
met a guy who was a producer for Here’s The Thing with Alec Baldwin. We talked about This American Life and he gave me a bunch of
recommendations for other shows on WNYC. I followed some of them up but didn’t
quite heed the call.
This year, I have listened to an enjoyed many more podcasts. Being something of
a film nerd, I have enjoyed listening to some podcasts about movies, such as
Film Junk, Cinereelists and the
Empire podcast. The latter has a bigger budget so includes
interviews as well as reviews. Film Junk and Cinereelists feature lengthy
discussions on film and are hosted by the sort of enthusiasts who will enter
into arguments about rating systems. I like that sort of thing. Wham Bam Pow is an action/sci-fi movie podcast that takes itself a lot less seriously and is
hosted by the fantastic Cameron Esposito.
NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour has made me happy most weeks and it treads
a pleasing line between interesting and pretentious discussion. I don’t always
agree with the presenters but that is the point I guess.
Alongside WTF, I have also started listening to other interview-style podcasts
including those from Richard Herring and Kevin Pollock, Sodajerker is also a fascinating if not slightly po-faced podcast featuring interviews
with songwriters on songwriting. I have also really enjoyed Radio 4’s Shortcuts with Josie Long on podcast, though feel it falls just shy of being a TAL for
the UK.
I am still going with podcasts and would love any recommendations.
Running
Absorbing podcasts has in part been
facilitated through running three times a week. As has been documented
elsewhere on this blog, I had started running (properly) this year after
following the NHS podcast Couch to 5k. I am now running 5k three times a week, which is a feat I hadn’t thought possible this time last year.
I am conscious that I have been evangelical about fitness in the past, only to
fall off the wagon later. I have never ran 5k before however and have continued
to push myself even as the weather has grown colder and the days have grown
shorter.
Unlike other forms of exercise, you can
take running with you wherever you go. This year, I have enjoyed running in
Oxford, Prague, Amsterdam, San Francisco and more recently the countryside in
Leicestershire and Somerset. Last month I bought myself some new and better
trainers. I hope to get better and run further in 2015.
Vancouver
In May, I was lucky enough to visit Vancouver for work and even luckier to have
a day to myself on the Saturday while I was there. It was immediately the sort
of place where I wished I had more time to explore and less time for work! I
tried to pack as much as I could in.
I was staying in downtown but managed to get my head round the confusing bus
system so I could make it out to other parts of the city. Vancouver is one of
those cities that has grown and grown and, in parts, priced its citizens out to
the edges. The city remains vibrant however and there are still scenes reminiscent
of
Panic in Needle Park-era New York on
East Hastings where the ghosts who gather there show the reality of British Columbian social
inequality and addiction. I caught a movie at the nearby
Odeon on the third
floor of an eerie shopping mall in Chinatown. Shoppers were few and it felt like I had stumbled into Dawn of the Dead.
Vancouver boasts stunning views that hint at the continuing beauty of British
Columbia. It is a city that can make you feel quite small, that you are only
scratching the surface. I enjoyed wonderful
views on walk around the circumference of Stanley Park and from the beach at
the gentrified Kitsilano and from the top of Main St where I could see
mountains. The best views I saw were from the University of British Columbia,
where a walk through an uninspired campus led to summit looking out to the
English Bay. One of the people I met pointed out the bald eagles that he could
see from his office window.
Before leaving for Canada, I had been given some fantastic food recommendations
from my brother who had visited before and a colleague who had gone to
university at Simon Fraser. I ate cheap and I ate very well! I had incredible
fish tacos from the Tacofino Commissary; I
had the best sushi I have ever had from Toshi Sushi; I had a beautiful Reuben sandwich at Save on Meats; I was overwhelmed my
choice at the Granville Island Public Market; and I had
my first taste of poutine at the Templeton.
My favourite part of the trip was catching
Evan Dando at the
Biltmore Cabaret on the Friday night I was in Vancouver. For me, the Lemonheads were one of
those bands that I got into at an early stage and their albums have stayed with
me as nuggets I can pull from my CD collection when I need a blast of
nostalgia. They were the perfect pop band, balancing catchy hooks with infinite
sadness, captured in Evan Dando’s heartbreaking Gram Parsons-esque voice.
It is probably fair to say that Evan Dando could have done more had he not
suffered from addiction and mental illness. Seeing him live reminded me just
what a strong back-catalogue he actually has. Seeing Evan on stage alone, wearing a t-shirt he had probably kept from the
nineties and hearing those fragile songs so raw and stripped-down revealed such
an awful poignancy that many times during the gig I could have wept. Yet
despite his haunted stage presence and his rudimentary strumming of the old
songs, there was so much love for Evan in the audience that night that being
there was beautiful and moving, rather than depressing. I can’t say how much Evan
felt he connected with the audience that night, but we were with him every step
of the way.
I looked to find footage online of the gig but could only find videos of his
performance at the Horshoe Tavern in Toronto, roughly two weeks after I saw
him. In the videos he performs Confetti, My Drug Buddy and Rudderless.
These songs were also highlights of the show I saw, so although the sound
quality of the videos is poor I am able to reconnect with how I felt that
night. My friend Joe once told me that Confetti reminds him of me and I wish he
has been with me to see it. Evan also played tracks from his underrated album Baby
I’m Bored. Here’s a link to my favourite track on the album for no reason. He
played this one too.
A football
match
In October this year, I went to my first football
match in about fifteen years since I saw Coventry City get beaten by AFC Ajax
in a Charity friendly towards the end of the nineties. I was going to write an
entire blog post about the experience but found that either I didn’t have
enough to say or I didn’t quite know how to put it.
When Joe suggested we go and see Dulwich Hamlet play Hendon, I was a little
surprised. My lack of interest in football is well documented. When people ask
me if I support a team, I say Coventry City, but I haven’t heard of any of
their players since Dion Dublin. I have been in enough awkward conversations
where my lack of basic soccer knowledge has been exposed (i.e. the ability to
name more than five players who actually play professional football now as
opposed to the early nineties when my brother was collecting Pro-Set Football cards) to know that it is possibly too late for me to even come late to football. Joe
assured me that it was a friendly atmosphere, you could drink beer in the stand
on account of it being low league football and that I’d enjoy it. I was in.
I have a complicated relationship with my lack of interest in football. It has
always seemed to me that some people have a problem understanding how anyone
could not like it. After all, it is an easy route in conversation. ‘Who do you
support’ is a usual ice-breaker and the worst things you can do when asked are either
claiming a lack of interest, blagging knowledge or saying as little as you can
get away with in the hope that the conversation topic will soon change. I do
all three of these things, with terrible results every time.
I couldn’t tell you much about the
technical aspects of the game, but I had a fantastic time and really got into
it. There is a very simple joy in picking a team to support and watching them
play a game to see if they win or not. If you actually go onto support that
team and maintain your support through good times and bad times, I imagine that
joy can be tested, or at least become more nuanced or inexplicable. I was more
of a tourist on my day at the football, but I still had my heart in my mouth at
times. Such was my commitment, I can’t remember who won and who lost, but for
me it was more about the experience of being there.
We were sat in front of an old man and his grandson. Throughout the game, the
grandson asked his grandfather question after question and it was obvious that
he hung on the old man’s every word. I realized just how nostalgic ones
relationship with football can be. For some football can be a route straight
back to childhood, like Star Wars or McDonalds or Lord of the Rings. I missed
all that because my Dad didn’t care much for football either. I had no one
kicking that love of football over to me. I don’t mourn it because it doesn’t
matter, but I can see why it is important to others.
After that Saturday I talked about the Dulwich match with a
colleague and he dismissed it as hipster football. Apparently, there are fewer
beards and craft beers at most football matches.
The
Shining
The best book I have read this year is The Shining
by Stephen King. I have always liked the film and have seen it many times, so I
was very familiar with the story. This does not stop the novel from being
thrilling, surprising and terrifying.
The main differences between the film and the novel can be found in the
dynamics between the characters and particularly in the character of Wendy
Torrance. For the film, Kubrick had a patriarchal vision of the Torrance
family, which placed Jack Nicolson as Jack Torrance as the unhinged head of the
household, with Shelly Duvall as Wendy Torrance as his weak, victimised wife.
Kubrick’s treatment of Duvall during the
filming of The Shining is well documented and is reflected partly in Vivian
Kubrick’s (Stanley’s daughter) short film, Making The Shining. In this
documentary, we see how Nicolson was treated as the star of the show while
Duvall was undermined and criticised. The actress admits to suffering ill
health during the shoot, but ultimately expresses her admiration for Kubrick in
pushing her to deliver the performance he was looking for. In a later interview, Duvall softened slightly: “In my character I had to cry 12 hours a day, all day
long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week. I was there a
year and a month, and there must be something to Primal Scream therapy, because
after the day was over and I'd cried for my 12 hours, I went home very
contented. It had a very calming effect. During the day I would have been
absolutely miserable."
The Wendy Torrance of the novel is at odds with Duvall’s representation and
Kubrick’s version. In reading The Shining, I enjoyed rediscovering this
character and she emerges as a stronger, more rounded and more ingenious foil
to her crazed husband. The Torrance family itself is also more believable in
the novel and Jack Torrance’s dissent into madness is much more subtle. Stephen
King himself is on record in saying that the movie version of Wendy Torrance is
“one of the most misogynistic characters ever put
on film”, though this it appears was Kubrick’s design.
Spooky
hotels
Following on from The Shining, Emily and I visited
(but didn’t stay in) a couple of spooky hotels earlier this year. In April we
spent a week with my family in a cottage in Noss Mayo in Devon. One day we
walked across the bay at low tide to the village of Newton Ferrers and followed
the path along the water to where Newton Creek meets the River Yealm. There we
found an old hotel looking out over the bay.
The Yealm Hotel appeared to be abandoned and there were no staff and no guests
to be seen. Emily and I wondered how such a landmark could be left to fall into
disuse, particularly with such fantastic views. We imagined taking the hotel on
ourselves, claiming squatters rights and then having to ask Alex Polizzi to
help us out, given our lack of experience.
On closer inspection, it appears that the hotel is still available for private hire and – optimistically – for weddings. The photos of the rooms on the
website date back to 2005 and suggest that the interior could do with a lick of
paint, if not an entire face-lift.
The website also says that the hotel dates
back to 1898 and was built to serve a railway that never made it to Newton
Ferrers. An old family
photo on Flickr dating back to the 1920s offers only a
small clue to the heritage of the building.
Coincidentally, I read Jonathan Raban’s mournful state-of-the-nation travel
memoir Coasting this year, and found that the author stayed at the Yealm during
his travels round the coast of the UK in the early 80s. There, Raban meets one
of the many anachronistic ex-military gentleman who populate the pages of Coasting
as well as a precocious parrot called Pepe. Both the hotel as it stands today
and Raban’s description of the hotel are reminders of a faded British past.
Emily and I also visited the
Burgh Island Hotel at Bigbury-on-Sea. The tide was out so we were able to walk across to the
island and look out to sea from the hut on the hill behind the hotel.
Life on the island dates back to the 1890s when music-hall star George H.
Chirgwin built a prefabricated wooden house on the island, which was
used for weekend parties. The land was sold in 1927 to film-maker Archibald
Nettlefold, who built the art-deco hotel that still stands today. The hotel
boasts tennis courts, a spa, a pub, a billiards room and a helicopter-landing
pad. Famous guests include Agatha Christie, Noel Coward and the Beatles when
they played Plymouth.
It costs at least £450 a night to stay there, so it
was not for the likes of us. The website says that it is three and a half hours
from London, so you can see who they are pitching it to. I’d like to stay
there, if only because it looks like the sort of pad a Bond villain would
reside. I’d like to sit in the window, look out to sea and stroke a cat.
Graffiti
One of my colleagues is a keen photographer
and he said recently that as you take more and more photos, your subjects begin
to emerge. In this sense, your subject is chosen for you by your instinct
rather than through thought. Since I bought a new camera this year, I am still
working towards the subject.
Although it is a cliché, one of things that I have taken the most photographs
of this year is of graffiti. I don’t feel that my photos add anything to the
art-works themselves, but my photos do help take me back to the places I’ve
visited. Like any photos!
I have been meaning to collect my thoughts on this, but at the moment I have
more photos than ideas. I like graffiti but at the moment, the photos speak for
themselves. I have some great memories attached to the photos and below are
some of my favourites.
In Paris in August, Emily and I stumbled upon where Serge Gainsborg used to
live. How did we know? It was covered in graffiti.
The Lennon Wall that I saw in Prague in September was pretty cool and was the
subject of my first blog post.
Since one of my previous blog posts I have been trying to take more photos of
the SOAK and BWS tags around Oxford. This was in a car park at the end of
Bullingdon Road. The building has since been destroyed.
There was a wall of graffiti near where I was staying in the Jordaan on
Lijnbaansgracht and this was one of the pieces. It is horrific but cool and
reminds me of Henry Moore’s Shelter sketches or some of the more sinister
depictions of Harvey Pekar.
I had a great weekend with Emma and Ewan in Amsterdam. On the Saturday
afternoon it was wet and dreary but we went over to the NDSM ship yard to see
the graffiti on the old factory buildings and the artists’ studios.
Unfortunately, we were there the wrong weekend for the flea market.
There are two blocks worth of graffiti on Lilac Street in the Mission District
of San Francisco. These are a few examples of mine, but there is more to be seen on another blog from someone else.
I met a guy while I was there who told me I had to visit the Bayview district
for more graffiti.
At the weekend in San Francisco, I went out with Ann, Nate and Beau to the
Marin Headlands to check out some of the graffiti at the old base station,
which was part of a military base until the 1960s. I have found another blog
with similar photos of the base station and other batteries in the area, as
well as various youtube videos, some cheesy and some slightly melodramatic.The
old base was quite spooky, but I didn’t see any ghosts!
I had a lovely weekend in the south of
France with Emily, Hannah and Olly. We visited Avignon where there were a few
pieces I snapped at.
Jake Gyllenhaal
I have enjoyed watching Jake Gyllenhaal
this year and he has starred in two of my favourite films of 2014: Nightcrawler
and Enemy. * From Donnie Darko to Jarhead to Zodiac to End of Watch, Jake
Gyllenhaal has made some interesting choices as an actor and 2014 has been a
great year for him.
Nightcrawler is one of the best satires of
the media since Network and Gyllenhaal’s performance is as dark and as complex
as Robert DeNiro’s in King of Comedy. Like Network, the film has as much to say
about the media as it does the society who consumes it. Gyllenhaal’s Louis
Bloom is as much a product of the mediatized easy-winner culture, as he is a
shrewd and manipulative self-starter, in tune with and exploitative of the
bloodlust of a corporation, who will report digestible and offensive clichés over
truth. Nightcrawler is about the media, but it is also about capitalist culture
and social control. Jake Gyllenhaal gets it. He won’t win an Oscar even though
he should.
I had been interested to watch Enemy after a recommendation from my friend Nate
and also because it was the new movie from Denis
Villeneuve, whose movies Incendies and Prisoners
I had also enjoyed. In this movie Gyllenhaal plays doppelgängers, unaware of
each other’s existence at the start of the movie. Based on a novel by José Saramago, Enemy dramatises the lead up to and the fall-out
from the doppelgängers meeting. Gyllenhaal gives another stern performance,
which is complemented by some moody camera work in a muted and greying Toronto.
Some surprising and surreal visuals do not disrupt a steady and eerie pace and
this betrays a director in complete control of the unfolding of this bizarre
and unsettling story. It was also good to see another movie with Mélanie
Laurent, who was so good in Inglorious Basterds and Beginners.
Next year Gyllenhaal will star in new movies from David O. Russell (The Fighter),
Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), Baltasar Kormákur (Jar City) and Jean-Marc Vallée
(Dallas Buyers Club), all of whom have bad movies (American Hustle, Olympus Has
Fallen, 2 Guns, Young Victoria) on their resume. Hopefully, Jake’s run of magic
will continue.
* Enemy is actually a 2013 movie, but for
some reason it was delayed in making it over to Europe. It as only just come
out in the UK but I saw it in Brussels in October.
Food
A run-down of the year would not be complete
without a few favourite meals thrown in for good measure. What can I say? Food
is usually my downfall.
L’Ardois, Paris
Emily and I went to Paris this year for her 30th birthday and
L’Ardois was the restaurant I found not far from our hotel. I had never enjoyed
duck as much before visiting L’Ardois, but then a couple of days later I had a
dish at the nearby Le Comptoir des Petits Champs that gave it
a run for its money. Both dishes were tender, melt in your mouth and washed
down with plenty of red wine. Paris can make you feel like a right marching gutlord!
I ate at the Swan Restaurant when I visited
Toronto in 2011 for a conference and remembered how good it was. When visiting
Toronto again in May, I couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant but had a
vague idea where it was. With the help of an internet street map, the
streetview feature and a taxi, I was able to find it again. It is probably one
of the best place I have eaten, both for its low-key, humble charm and its
incredible comfort food. I recommend the crisp roasted bbq capon. It is a winner.
Slow Cooked Lamb, My House
The problem with Tom Kerridge’s fine cook book, Proper Pub Food, is that you
often need a week to prepare most of the dishes. As affable and as
unpretentious Tom may appear on the telly, he is true chef at heart and many of
his recipes are quite tricky or at least time consuming. His five-hour cooked
shoulder of lamb is one of the dishes in the book that requires the least
amount of time, so with guest coming for Sunday lunch in July, I decided to
give it a go.
I had some doubts about spending around £15 on a shoulder of lamb but it turned
out to be a wise investment. Not only is the recipe delicious, a good cut of
shoulder turned out to be the meat that kept on giving. It fed four for Sunday
lunch and we were still eating it on Tuesday, making up about eight meals in
all. I may book out some time to attempt another Kerridge in the new year.
St. Anselm, New York
I visited Mischa in New York in February
and was delighted to return with him to St. Anselm, a restaurant I had visited
a couple of years before. It is one of the best steak places I have eaten and
worth the wait for a table. You can have a drink in the bar next door of in the
Commodore across the road, and work up an appetite. The Butcher Steak is a must
for all meat lovers.
Among Jason Atherton’s London restaurants is
the Little Social on Pollen St and it is there I ate for my birthday this year
and enjoyed one of the best burgers I have eaten. The Little Social is more of
a humble bistro than a fine-dining experience and that is more my sort of
thing. The burger came with poutine, which was a fantastic alternative to chips
and Emily and I both had apple donuts for pudding with Chantilly cream and
cinnamon sugar. It was a happy birthday for me!
Earlier in the year, Emily and went to see the
movie Chef and we left the theatre feeling quite hungry and wondering where all
the street food was in Oxford. Walking through town, we realized it was all
around us. Oxford after all has kebab vans coming out of its ears.
On further investigation, I discovered Bitten Oxford, a website that has
catalogued and reviewed most of the restaurants around Oxford. It has recently
been trying to do more to establish a street-food culture in the city, bringing
together various food trucks at the castle once a month and at the North Parade Market.
Emily and I visited both their Christmas
markets in December and enjoyed a spicy pizza straight from a wood-fired oven
courtesy of the
Secret Pizza Society, a warming mulled cider from
Bar De Cru, a
mouthwatering pulled pork batch from
Toro Poco, an indulgent salted caramel
brownie from
Barefoot Kitchen and we bought some lovely (and festive) coffee
from
Varsity.
In the New Year, I look forward to eating some more locally produced food.
Saltburn by the Sea
The seaside of the northeast is my favourite part of the British coastline
so on a trip to a conference in Middlesbrough in June, I didn’t miss a chance
to see the sea and get some fish and chips and an ice cream.
I wish I had taken my camera.
When I was fourteen, I joined my Mum and my Gran on a trip up to the northeast for
Gran to visit her various sisters. I wasn’t meant to be going, but decided at
the very last minute after I had asked a girl in my class out at the end of
term and she had said no. It was the first time I thought that getting out of
Coventry would be a good idea and it wouldn’t be my last.
My Gran’s sisters ranged from the warm and lovely to the scornful and manic. We
stayed with my great auntie Dorothy, a warm and gentle lady, whose husband Alec
had died a few years previously. My memories of Dorothy are clouded by the last
time I saw her in a nursing home, where she struggled to remember who was
visiting her. Mostly I remember her boiled potatoes, ham and peas pudding,
which she seemed to make every day.
We stayed with Dorothy because she was the
sister who my Gran liked the most; that is to say that she was the only of my
Gran’s sisters for whom she did not have an unkind word to say. We visited a
different sister each day, sitting in living rooms and drinking tea. I would
tune out of conversation when the accents became too thick and sink into a
chair on my own with a paperback.
I was a shy and unsociable boy and found it difficult to make friends. I
enjoyed buying and reading second hand books from second hand bookshops. I
remember during that week in South Shields discovering that the Yellow Pages
was the best way of finding all the second hand book shops in a city and tried
my best to engineer our days, so that we would pass and stop off at one or two
on our journey.
At the end of each visit, my Gran would bitch and moan on the way back to
Auntie Dorothy’s about the sister we had just left. Even sweet and kind Auntie
Una did not escape Gran’s torrent. I remember only a few things about Una: that
she always seemed to be smiling, that her house was cozy and that her skin was
soft like my Gran’s and my Mum’s. She loved her family and talked about her
children and her grandchildren with warm pride.
To save Una from cooking, Mum went out at lunch to buy us all fish and chips,
which we ate at the table. At the end of the visit, Una took me to one side and
gave me a ten pound note, asking me not to tell my Mum. It was the most money I
had been given at one time by someone of my grandparent’s generation and I
could not believe it. I would often receive the odd pound coin or two of a
visit, but never a note. My Granddad would often give my brother and I the
opportunity to put our pound towards his football bets, but we never won any
more.
I told my Mum anyway on the journey home. Gran tutted.
“It’s because you insisted on paying for those chips, Karen,” she said.
“It was very kind of her,” said Dorothy.
Great Auntie Jen was the maddest of the sisters. She had frizzy white hair,
dark glasses and a northeastern accent with a thickness only rivaled by her
husband Stan. I didn’t understand a word coming out of Great Uncle Stan’s
mouth, but none of it seemed to be very pleasant.
I remember keeping a low profile at Auntie Jen’s house. The atmosphere was
thick and there seemed to be tension between Jen and her daughter. I was
reading a book of plays by AA Milne and kept my head down.
Gran was furious on the way home.
“I bet she had not idea why he was there,” Gran said gesturing at me. “Just
reading his book quietly. She wouldn’t understand why anyone would read a
book.”
Jen hadn’t given me any money. I don’t even remember getting a kiss.
In the evenings we walked to the coast from Dorothy’s house, stopping for a tea
at the Marsden Grotto and looking out to sea at the great chunk of rock just
towards the end of the beach.
Although it was a freezing February, I was seized by an urgent need to go for a
swim. One night, Mum and I went out on our own and had fish and chips again on
the pier at South Shields. I can’t remember exactly how we got from the chips
to the swimming, but I do remember that there was nothing Mum could do to stop
me stripping down to my underpants and wading into the sea. I remember that the
light of the day was fading, I remember that the cold water took my breath away
but that I strode in with confidence and I remember thinking about the girl in
my class who I had asked out as I jerked around in the water and feeling that
my need to swim had something to do with forgetting her.
I was thinking about the swim in South Shields in Saltburn, as I ate my fish
and chips and drank my beer at the Sea View Restaurant and looked out at the
surfers and the Victoria pier. I thought of my Gran and her sisters and how I
sometimes missed all those who have since vanished from the family and how I
wished that I had listened more intently to their bitching and their squabbles,
instead of burying my head in books.
