The Art of Self-Defense (2019)

Peak Jesse Eisenberg, I thought. Quirky, indie comedy for the Sundance set, I further concluded, not having read up on any reviews. 

In auto-pilot mode for the first twenty minutes or so, we'd not even fully clocked that it was a period piece seemingly set in the early 90s.

And then we started to sit up straight, caught almost completely unawares, as Riley Stearns takes this tale of a timid accountant drawn into to the increasingly sinister microcosm of his local karate dojo in carefully calibrated stages from yellow right through to darkest black. 

Like the students of disarmingly malignant 'Sensei', his movie punches hard with its feet. 

New Assimilations

Crikey, look what they do to the poor freshers now at Girton — matching tees like some sort of expeditionary force of itinerant bible-bashers from Oklahoma.

Mientras más consume, más ahorra...

COVER CHALLENGE: Day Four

I've accepted the challenge for posting the cover of 7 books I love. One a day, no explanation, no review - just the cover.

Piedra del Peñol

Ascended that staircase in May last year. The view from the top at least is to be recommended.

This is just a little bit how I was made to feel recently when I returned home having neglected to purchase one item! 

Septemberfest

One has to wonder just how many years this event has to take place here before someone points out that Oktoberfest is supposed to occur in September. 

It's a bit like eating mince pies in the middle of January (not that I have never done that). 

Maybe they already know, but have just decided not to confuse all the stupid people. 

COVER CHALLENGE: Day Three

I've accepted the challenge for posting the cover of 7 books I love. One a day, no explanation, no review - just the cover.

Crawl (2019)

This film could easily have been the trigger that prompted Donald Trump to moot the idea of establishing a 'moot' (sic) packed with ravenous reptiles along the southern border of the USA. 

Crawl might not deter would-be migrants, but one suspects it could make a few people put their Florida retirement plans on hold.

I've spent a fair bit of time in the sunshine state, indeed I've taken the road trip across its midriff on I-75 from Palm Beach to Naples, across what is known to locals as Alligator Alley. Until now I didn't have the impression that these creatures were quite the head-chomping megafauna presented here by director Alexandre Aja (he of Piranha 3D.) 

We went in at least semi-blind, both thinking this was a film where the primary source of hazard would be a Category 5 hurricane, so when the first giant gator makes its precipitous entrance, we were suitably aghast, though the best jump scare is actually delivered just prior to that by a falling tree.  

Polemics

I read this rather drole, self-congratulatory diary entry from Richard Dawkins this morning > "As I sign the books, I never tire of hearing, over and over: The Selfish Gene is the reason I went to university to study science.’ ‘You cured me of religion.’ ‘Because of you I am now an ex-Muslim.’ ‘You changed my life.’"

The Cover Challenge presents some interesting dilemmas, particularly with the non-fiction titles. Can one post the cover of an at least partially controversial text one 'loves' without appearing to wholeheartedly endorse its content?

I recall that David Bowie listed the book below as one of his all time favourites. It's one of mine too. Yet in a sense, it's also, as our PM might say, a load of cobblers. (The man Dawkins referred to as 'our sick joke Prime Minister' in the same entry.)

I'd like to have it in my seven, yet feel I cannot, at least not without comment. I wonder what Bowie thought.

As for The Selfish Gene, it's definitely one of those books that marks a turning point in one's education, though it's somewhat difficult to feel warm and cuddly about, as is its author.

COVER CHALLENGE: Day Two

I've accepted the challenge for posting the cover of 7 books I love. One a day, no explanation, no review - just the cover.

Fast & Furious: Hobbs and Shaw (2019)

These Fast & Furious chapters are a bit like the Ferrero Rocher ads in that, as Ben Elton put it, the proverbial piss has already been taken out of them in their very production. In other words they are sufficiently detached from reality to owe the viewer only the barest nods to real world verisimilitude. You start thinking ‘No, that wouldn’t...’ and then almost inevitably pull up short. 

The original films found their audience by pitching a group of B-list actors from varied ethnic backgrounds as a sort of on-screen action family. Eventually they were joined by two men who had genuine, lasting A-list status in the form of the Rock and the Stathe, so spinning them off this way makes considerable commercial sense. 

The first half (roughly the running time of any normal film) is highly enjoyable, but after that it turns into a series of endings that aren’t. Though the best line in the film does come fairly late on, when Hobbs’s Samoan mother says to him ‘you’re all skin and bones’.

Looks familiar...

How much does this schnauzer look like the late Duchess of Alba? 

COVER CHALLENGE: Day One

I've accepted the challenge for posting the cover of 7 books I love. One a day, no explanation, no review - just the cover.

The Munchies, Top Ten

These, I have decided fairly arbitrarily, are my top ten favourite restaurants in the world.

I have had a bizarrely fortunate, privileged existence which has allowed me the opportunity to stay at some of the world's finest hotels and dine at many of its most celebrated eateries, including a handful with Michelin stars. Yet none of those made the cut for this list, because it is far more personal than an attempt to fanfarronear some sort of objective, solipsistic scale of culinary quality. 

Instead, here are the places I would simply run to if ever I were to find myself once more in one of the relevant locations. There are memories to be satiated. 

There are ten of them, but there is no particular order. 

Pétrelle, Paris (France)
My wife and I got into the habit of avoiding Paris in the noughties. We'd circumnavigate it, stay in Rouen or Orléans and breathe a sigh of relief. But then in the early part of this decade I discovered the Eurostar out of St Pancras. In three hours I could be at the Gare du Nord and shortly afterwards at the Anvers metro stop, just a short walk away from Petrelle, which is everything one could ask of a small restaurant in this lovely, if occasionally abrasive city. It seems it may be closed for refurbishment right now, which is a pity because shamboliic kitschiness is its very essence. 

The African Queen, Beaulieu (France)
A permanent reminder of a movie I have always meant to watch. An absolute favourite through choldhood, adolescence and early adulthood. My mother could make me smile just by mentioning it. There's always something special about eating in a small port. 

Sylvain, New Orleans (USA)
This is such a good city in which to eat and drink, but this bistro is the place that most caught my attention. Set in a seventeenth century carriage house in the French Quarter, Sylvain sits on the funky gastropub end of the serious eating scale. 

El Bar Liguria, Santiago (Chile)
I've made three trips to Chile in the last few years and I'm starting to think of Santiago as my favourite destination in South America. Liguria might even be the place I'd choose to teleport to right now over all other contenders. It was the first location I settled at in SCL — a meeting place suggested by a Guatemalan entrepreneur who'd spent some time in the city — and I can't quite pinpoint now what the enduring appeal has been, other than the fact that it resembles in many ways a joint that I frequented in London in my youth called Wheelers in St James's. Sitting at the bar and interacting with the eccentric types who served the food and wine was always a key part of the experience.

El Yantar de Baco, Cenes de la Vega (Spain)
Back in the early noughties we criss-crossed the Iberian peninsula in our car on multiple occasions, trips that almost inevitably involved many fine meals, often surrounded by highly-animated families with children close to midnight. Yet the one that sticks in the memory took place in this packed little bar-restaurant with its sawdust-covered floors in a small town quite close to Granada.

Umakyu, Tokyo (Japan)
This spot in Shinjuku's Piss Alley encapsulates for me the very essence of Japan. First taken here by V's old friend Satoshi, with whom she studied in London back in 1991, I have returned again and again. The first time Satoshi ordered up horse sashimi, on the grounds that this was possibly the best way to amusingly vex an Englishman. I consumed it without undue protestation and then returned and ordered the same dish on my return, alone, in 2015.  

Kito Kito, Kyoto (Japan)
There are so many places in Japan where one can sit at a long bar and partake of a series of small, exquisitely-prepared dishes. This just happens to be my personal preference. 

Casa Oaxaca, Oaxaca (Mexico)
Said to have been the favourite restaurant of Gabriel García Márquez, this is simply the best place to dine in Mexico's most mole-laden city. 

Mestizo, Santiago (Chile) 
If I didn't live in La Antigua I think I'd probably adopt an essentially pescatorian diet. For a city that's landlocked about an hour and a half by road from the Pacific, the range of fishy options in Santiago is extraordinary, starting with the Mercado Central, and leading all the way up to this, a smart and innovative contemporary seafood restaurant in the swish neighbourhood of Vitacura. 

La Vigie, Monte Carlo Beach (France)
Another childhood favourite that I know my father would probably have cited as his favourite place in the whole world. Set beneath Villa La Vigie, which was first derelict, then Karl Lagerfeld's crib, before becoming a sort of mega-premium airbnb option, this was the place that SBM in Monaco used to blood its its latest generation of potentially lifelong staff. It features the sort of summer buffet for which radical Islamists would trade in their heavenly virgins. These days, according to their Instagram feed, it has been somewhat hipped up, which may or may not be a good thing.

Mobs and Toffs

It could be said that the whole purpose of a Parliament or Congress in a representative democracy is to act as a filtration system to eliminate as best as possible the instincts of the mob. The US Constitution is almost explicit about this and it is surely the principal reason why we no longer hang people in the UK. 

Yet now, we have an executive branch, nested inside our Parliament, which is openly stirring up those mob instincts whilst asserting that ‘the people’ have some sort of moral ascendency over their elected representatives. 

This can’t be healthy. 

Noticias...

Escuchando Babosadas

RIP Michael D. Coe

'What's happened to democracy in this country?'

Given the age profile of many Leave-voters, these riots could be quite amusing. You can do a lot of damage with a compressed air tank. 

In truth this sort of thing seems to bubble beneath the surface even more in countries like Spain, where one often comes across packs of angry-looking, slightly stunted, Franco-era wrinklies out on the verges of provincial main roads. 

Knowing and Embarrassed

An update from The Spectator today...

Theresa May’s former PR chief Robbie Gibb has revealed that during government Brexit negotiations with Labour last year, senior shadow cabinet members ‘repeatedly tried to thwart attempts to find common ground and move forward’. At one meeting Brexit secretary Keir Starmer ‘opened his remarks by dismissing proposals, outlined in a discussion document, as “totally inadequate”’ but then Theresa May’s chief of staff Gavin Barwell said ‘these are Labour’s own proposals. They have been literally cut and pasted from a document you submitted to us’. Gibb says Labour’s reaction was a ‘knowing and embarrassed laugh’.

A laugh at least some of them must have practiced...behind Corbyn’s back.