Here's technology put to a good use. Artists in the Middle East and Africa find it hard - impossible- to get a visa to visit this country. But they can use email.
Read more in the Financial Times
Pity the po'boy who had to eat so much
It was a tough gig, checking out the restaurants in that seductive city of New Orleans. It is impressive how the city has rallied since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Now new areas which would have been considered dangerous are beginning to burgeon with small eateries. Dangerous because the Crescent City has a high murder rate, in fact, the local news site used to publish a murder map. It seems to have been dropped - perhaps because it needed up dating pretty much any day.
Here's a piece that appeared in The Guardian.
The picture used of the cocktail bar is a little out date and missed the opportunity to use one of the mixologist Abigail Gullo - a real star so I've added one here.
Small is beautiful in an ordinary sort of way
Above, the Tehran brigand below the Nasrid tower in Spain
Not far from the forbidding expanse of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and overshadowed by the inexorable advance of skyscrapers is one of the Chinese capital’s last remaining traditional communities, the Cha'er Hutong.
People have lived in the crowded quarters of hutongs with their courtyards and narrow alleys for centuries but now, increasingly, they are being demolished and the residents moved out into tower blocks sometimes hundreds of kilometres away to make way for roads and more skyscrapers.
New life has been breathed into this particular courtyard, however.
Read more: http://gulfnews.com/culture/architecture/at-aga-khan-awards-modest-architecture-wins-1.1911411
Fun, fury and a feast
I had word of a street art event in Spain and assumed with my trip to Valparaiso fresh in my mind that I would know all - or, at least, something - about it. Not so; this was Chilean performance art about which I knew next to nothing at all. Hey ho. Here's piece that danced its way into the FT
https://www.ft.com/content/13696116-6ea1-11e6-a0c9-1365ce54b926
How fly was that
Haven't been fishing since the opening day of the trout season in Algonquin Park, Ontario, many many, years ago. Used a lure then but fly fishing - now that's an art.
Valparaiso; how absurd you are...
The Chile port of Valparaiso is a marvel of corrugated iron and colour, one of the oddest, most delightful cities in South America. Share my thoughts on; www.independent.co.uk/travel/americas/valparaiso-city-guide-street-art-tours-and-funicular-rides-a6970096.html
Might - or right?
Artist and Empire” at London’s Tate Britain gallery (until April 10, 2016), sets out to explain how colonial Britain was portrayed from the late 16th century to the swaggering power of the 18th and 19th centuries and on to the present day. Read more.
Retribution by Edward Armitage
Rodin reborn
The poet Rainier Rilke enthused to his friend, the sculptor Auguste Rodin: “My dear great friend, you should see this beautiful building and the room I have occupied since this morning. Its three bay windows open expansively onto an abandoned garden, where trusting rabbits can sometimes be seen leaping through the trellises like figures in an ancient tapestry.”
Now that beautiful building, the Hôtel Biron - better known as the Musée Rodin - has reopened after three years in a triumphant €16 million resurrection worthy of Rodin’s works with all their intensity, physicality and unquenchable creativity.
Is there any more glorious a place in Paris?
http://gulfnews.com/culture/arts/rodin-s-legacy-lives-on-1.1642712
Fabulous fabric
I know little of India, less of fabrics but the Fabric of India at the V and A is a delight. It is not just a fabulous parade of colours and materials it shows how important the industry was - even being used by Gandhi in his struggle for Indian independence.
It's a gas
In the days when I worked Saturdays I would sometimes drive to work. The route took me past the mausoleum of St Pancras, the horrible mess of Kings Cross and the threatening gloom of York Way. Now it's all shiny blocks of flats, smart caffs and young men with dodgy beards. One of the symbols of that dystopian past was the gas works which loomed by the rail way line. Now they are coming back, all gussied up as a frame to an original resi block. Given the tedious nature of most new developments shooting up over London, a real attempt to do something interesting.
Really Healey
In the 1980s I commissioned the late Denis Healey to write a piece - and take the photographs - for the Sunday Mirror about a trip he was to take in South Africa. The negotiations over deadline and content were conducted by his ‘secretary’ who had a suspiciously vaudevillian falsetto. It dawned on me eventually that it was the great man himself who perhaps wanted to keep his distance from the sordid business of negotiating a fee (£1,000). He wrote a very perceptive piece on apartheid with pictures to match.
Bitter sweet taste of New Orleans
Ten years on from Hurricane Katrina tearing apart New Orleans I received a note from one Stephen Perry, President andCEO of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau, thanking ‘all of you who took us in when we had no place to go, helped us tell our story when we had no voice, helped us rebuild our homes and our city from ruin.’
He doesn’t know me from Adam but it coincided with several stories about the new wave of restaurants and cocktail bars in the city. A sign of regeneration though not a proof - New O is still a complex city of poverty, crime, glamour and music. And food.
My favourites include Bayona’s in the French Quarter, Irene’s and it is hard to resist Galatoires because it represents a past and a history that is woven into the city even if the food is over-rated. Best of all Dooky Chase’s down home cooking and for breakfast - even if the tourists are queuing - Mothers.
Five years ago I talked to the editor of the Times Picayune, the city’s newspaper which had done so much to reflect the anger and pain which followed in Katrina’s deadly wake.
A taste of New Orleans
Ten years on from Hurricane Katrina tearing apart New Orleans I received a note from one Stephen Perry, President andCEO of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau, thanking ‘all of you who took us in when we had no place to go, helped us tell our story when we had no voice, helped us rebuild our homes and our city from ruin.’
He doesn’t know me from Adam but it coincided with several stories about the new wave of restaurants and cocktail bars in the city. A sign of regeneration though not a proof - New O is still a complex city of poverty, crime, glamour and music. And food.
My favourites include Bayona’s in the French Quarter, Irene’s and it is hard to resist Galatoires because it represents a past and a history that is woven into the city even if the food is over-rated. Best of all Dooky Chase’s down home cooking and for breakfast - even if the tourists are queuing - Mothers.
Five years ago I talked to the editor of the Times Picayune, the city’s newspaper which had done so much to reflect the anger and pain which followed in Katrina’s deadly wake.
Away from the maddening crowd in Barbados
One of the treats to enjoy in Barbados is to take the bus. Most of the hotels on the somewhat over-stuffed west coast do tours but for five Barbadian dollars you can hop on public transport and go to Bathsheba on the unspoilt east coast. The tourist board explains this exotic name by invoking the legend of Bathsheba, wife of King David, who bathed in milk to keep her skin beautiful and soft. The surf covered white waters are said to resemble Bathsheba's bath in both appearance health giving value. Well, why not. It’s a beautiful spot with huge coral boulders along the empty beach and free of the west coast traffic and the crowded hotels.
One exception is Speightstown, which is delightfully ramshackle and relatively uncommercial. Best way to get there is on one of the reggae buses which blast their way along, shaking with music. There is an interesting building for sale in the town called the Old Pharmacy, above. It is painted a bright blue, with tall windows, a balcony that runs the length of the building under a pitched gabled roof and dormer windows.
According to local historians this style of architecture was imported to another British colony - Carolina. And there’s a reason for that: Only the oldest sons of the British colonialists who grew rich on the Barbadian sugar trade could inherit the family plantation. Many of the younger siblings headed for Carolina, bringing with them their lifestyle and architecture. I’m told that only three of these houses exist, the rest destroyed by fires over the centuries.
Read more in the International New York Times
The Aktiv Haus being craned into position
The thinking house
In 1927 a pioneering new estate opened its doors on a hillside overlooking the German city of Stuttgart. It was a radical development with houses and apartments designed by the most provocative architects of the day such as Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van de Rohe.
The Weissenhof estate with its concrete cubic forms and functional exteriors boasted swiftly assembled prefabricated buildings with steel skeleton frames which were designed to reduce costs and improve living conditions for the poor. For some it was the future.
Today on one of the estate’s side streets is a small glass box of a house. It too represents the future. The building is 914 square feet, with a prefabricated timber frame covered in glass fiber fabric. The windows which stretch the length of one side of the building are only 17 millimeters thick but consist of three layers of glass and keep cold and heat at bay. There are no environmentally unsound features such as plaster, glue or primer, let alone window frames set in bricks and made to fit with polyurethane, concrete and plaster.
Called B 10 after its street number on the estate’s Brukmannweg, the house was assembled in a few months and hoisted by crane into place over two days. Clean, functional, efficient, the building uses zero energy - absolutely no fossil fuels or nuclear power here - it produces zero emissions and it can be taken down and recycled to leave zero waste.
Another Day Lost by Issam Kourbaj
Window on the Arab World
When the first festival to celebrate Arab culture was held in 2011 it was suffused with the elation of the Arab Spring.
Shubbak; A Window on Contemporary Arab Culture coincided with the fall of tyrannies, the rise of hope, the sense that everything was changing for the better, but today, now that the world has seen the spring wither and die as quickly as it bloomed, what is the role of the third Shubbak? Only weeks after the slaughter of holidaymakers in Tunisia the troubles confronting the Arab world are more disruptive, more intractable.
What kind of festival can celebrate a culture that is tearing itself apart?
Read more: Gulf News July 15, 2015
The struggle after Katrina
One of the greatest cities in the world - and one of the most flawed, is New Orleans. It is almost a miracle that it has fought back from the tragedy of Katrina - despite the best efforts of the Bush government and the legal system. Read more
Life and Chimes. Or just strife
The announcement of the new football fixtures for the coming season bring that annual flicker of hope and pessimism. In fact, the best time of the season for a Portsmouth supporter is the half an hour before kick off. A few pints, still hopeful. The only exception was the 2002-3 season when the club romped away with the second division championship to win promotion. You can read about it in Life and Chimes, a random collection of interviews and commentary.
Doctor No, James Bond and Wellington
During the rather frenetic playback time with the Wall Street Journal for a piece about Waterloo the arts editor had time to send me this gem about Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington: Bond and Honey have just met Dr. No in his lair and are on their way up to dinner with him when Bond spots the painting nearby on an easel and does a doubletake. It was an inside joke at the time because the painting had been stolen from the National Gallery a year or two before and, at the time of the movie’s release still hadn’t been recovered, though it was shortly afterwards. Read the serious stuff on http://www.wsj.com/articles/two-hundred-years-on-london-celebrates-a-near-run-thing-1434493812
Read MoreCome on you whites
One of the most disappointing features of the England performance in the West Indies was not so much the efforts or skill of the team but the complete wit and originality of the not-very-Barmy Army. I was expecting many happy hours of boozy insults, witty one-liners and clever chants. Bit like a football match. Sometimes. Instead, apart from the tremendously inventive ‘Jimmy, Jimmy Jimmy Anderson’ and the depressingly derivative ‘Roooo’ for Root the best they could offer was the morning ritual of the first few verses of Jerusalem.
For the most part they sat around in stolid inebriation. How odd it is that the flags and favours worn at the games are for football teams, not an MCC tie to be seen; a group of Sunderland here, a depressed bunch of Scunthorpe fans there - all jealously guarding their flags draped along the perimeter. ‘It’s against protocol to cover a banner’ said one aggrieved West Brom fan when one of our group covered it with a West Indies flag.
So; cricket lovers as football fans or vice versa. Strange. Still, I was able to catch up on the latest Portsmouth score. Pompey 1, York City 1. I knew where I’d rather be.