beige bath towels

Nothing says, 'I have no idea what to get you,' quite like giant beige bath towels.
- Missbhavens

Hanif Kureishi on Italy

A fine piece of travel writing in today's Guardian Travel section by Hanif Kureishi. He's writing about being on holiday in the The Grand Hotel Gardone on Lake Garda in Italy. It's a piece that sometimes strains for melancholia :

"What to do? How to cope? I have no answers, but can only gape at the lake from an old hotel, which resembles a dissolving sugar lump, continuously reminded that western civilisation is in crisis. Indeed, as I tell the journalist, I consider it to be doomed, as cracks open up across its formerly firm surface, like the ping-pong ball the little boy and I use for table tennis."

But youth and optimism, like the face of his son mirroring his own youthful self, is what stays in my mind after finishing the piece.

I read it at a sunny suburban Dublin table while eating dinner. The piece, and the welcome sunburst during a wet Irish Summer makes me want to visit Italy again.

i think so?

Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised.
- Marilyn Manson

maybe

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.
- R. Buckminster Fuller

wonder if this is true?

Gore Vidal talking about Howard Austen, his companion, but not lover, for 53 years. 'It is very easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part and impossible when it does.' This satisfies no one of course but there, as Henry James would say, it is.'

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

First Timers?

advice

Wise piece of advice from “aunt Sally(!) in the Sunday Times magazine today :

“I once asked a therapist to define soul mates. She said: “It’s two people who recognise the damage in each other.” So much for romance – but what she was actually saying is that we are attracted to fragilities in other people that we know, often at an unconscious level, we share ourselves. If you really were at ease, you wouldn’t need to go around rescuing people who are insecure, anxious and inclined to melancholia. You wouldn’t need to rescue people at all. So, why do it? Well, when we don’t like our own fragilities, we deny them by painting ourselves as the opposite. We literally deny who we are. It’s called the false self.”

middle of nowhere?

A very provocative piece by Edward Luttwalk in this month's issue of PROSPECT magazine:

"The middle east was once the world's most advanced region, but these days its biggest industries are extravagant consumption and the venting of resentment. According to the UN's 2004 Arab human development report, the region boasts the second lowest adult literacy rate in the world (after sub-Saharan Africa) at just 63 per cent. Its dependence on oil means that manufactured goods account for just 17 per cent of exports, compared to a global average of 78 per cent. Moreover, despite its oil wealth, the entire middle east generated under 4 per cent of global GDP in 2006—less than Germany. Unless compelled by immediate danger, we should therefore focus on the old and new lands of creation in Europe and America, in India and east Asia—places where hard-working populations are looking ahead instead of dreaming of the past." (more HERE)

Election Sunday

Went to IMMA yesterday to see the Georgia O Keeffe exhibition. Still love her paintings, the cloth like desert warmness of them - even though they also always remind me of snow in Taos New Mexico where I lived in 1984. Saw the work of two others artists there too, photos of Thomas Demand and paintings by Alex Katz. Liked both a lot. The Thomas Demand work made me look forward to Berlin where I'm visiting in May.

Bertie called the election yesterday, so I'll be out of the country on election day and (worse) the day of the count. Not that bothered about missing the election but really pissed off at missing the count. Should have thought of all that before I booked my trip. Oh well, I'll observe it from Berlin.

It was strange to have the election called on a Sunday morning – apparently the president was leaving for America and had to sign the Dáil dissolution order before she left. Waking up and unexpectedly listening to a slightly over excited RTE special news programme was a bit disconcerting. No “Sunday Miscellany” today then. You’d think it was September 1939 again, that fine Sunday that Chamberlain declared war on Germany! Still, the end of an era. Took this photo in the grounds of IMMA.

God and the City

Another great quote from AA Gill in today's Sunday Times : "It’s only in a city that God really understands how to organise nature." He's talking about cycling by the river in London but what he says can be applied to many cities. As usual, in his funny provocative and OTT way he hits the nail right on the head.
"If this were the country, I’d never be able to get near the river. There would be a Passchendaele of barbed wire, seeping drums, decomposing agricultural machinery and miles and miles of agri-business megafields with an odd bit of brutalised hedgerow. The only thing skulling the river would be a skeletal sheep’s corpse. The countryside is nature’s scrap yard. You need a park to see the true symbolic beauty of Gaia’s bounty, and London has the greatest parks of any city — certainly far better than any bit of unmade, raw, grubby, poisonous, dung-and-pesticide countryside."
The full article (masquerading as a restaurant review) can be found here
The photo is from today's New York Times
(another city and another park as Spring arrives in NYC)

the who?

reminds me of 1970s. Still love it.

the Sopranos in 7.5 minutes!

LA Stories

a very good piece by Steve Gillmor about friendship, the 1970s and LA :

"LA is somehow feeling more like the 70’s now than in decades. I hated the 70’s at the time; a rough mix of post-Beatle depression and chalky outlines around the body that was the revolution. Thank god the revolution was over, but thirty years to wait for the wisdom that comes from enough mistakes to convince you of your own mortality"

more here

a poem for spring

Talking Sense?

Prospect magazine asks people what will replace the left/right agenda. I liked this reply by Rudi Bogni:
"Left vs right was and is purely a nominal distinction between two strands of the same totalitarian posture. The real problem of the 20th century was that the demographic and economic pressures that fractured the empires gave rise to national states with leaderships ill equipped to face the nihilist challenge. The vacuum was filled by totalitarian regimes, whose ideologies set fire to Europe and the world. Remember that Hitler was a failed architect, Stalin had studied for the priesthood and Mussolini was a schoolteacher. The heirs of the 19th and 20th century nihilists are today's faith-based terrorists. If today's democracies fail to win against the new nihilists on the intellectual and communication level, they will have no chance to win in the security space and will create another dangerous vacuum, ready to be filled. Nation states have proven a disastrous political experiment in the 19th and 20th century; they may well prove catastrophic in the 21st century, due to nuclear proliferation. Nevertheless, I hope that the 21st century will see a substantial reduction of political infrastructures. If a conglomerate is bad or indifferent at most of what it does, shareholders force it back to its core competences. Everything else has got to go. Why should it be different for governments? This is neither left nor right; it is common sense. Large countries' politicians love to deride small countries' direct democracies. Why? Because they fear their example and their nimbleness. The political systems inherited from the 20th century, whether democratic or totalitarian, are neo-feudal, incompatible with a 21st century when electors vote every so many years, but consumers vote and bloggers blog 24/7."

favourite clip from a favourite film

12 good things about 2007 #10

just finished watching the movie THE LIVES OF OTHERS. I know its early in the year, but I'll be surprised if I see a better movie this year.

12 Good things about 2007, # 11

AA Gill's food column in the Sunday Times Style magazine. Today he is writing about bores. Here's an excerpt , you can read the whole thing here:

"There was a time when numberless bores strode the earth. They were famous, fascinating and feared. Hostesses would use them to punish rivals. They were pitted against one another in great buttoned-leather, port-fuelled, fireside bore-offs, competitive raconteuring. A bore’s lonely calling was respected — the slow winnowing of facts until just the grittiest chaff could be thrown in the faces of the stultified. But today, a fractured society, disjointed by haste and hustle, fleet with texting, e-mail, iPods and Sky+, has worn away the bore’s domain. Where are the 12-course dinner parties of yore, the bridge evenings, the wet-country-weekend lock-ins? Nowadays, it’s lean pickings for the bore. The only protected environment left to him is a newspaper column, where he can expostulate ad infinitum into the darkness and the kitty litter."

Did he overlook Blogging as part of that protected environment?