China Picspam - Part 1 (Beijing)

Long time no write!

I have just returned from a fantastic trip to Beijing and Shanghai with a suitcase full of exotic teas (see last picture below), memories and pictures! Here are just a few of them while I recover from the jet lag and gather my thoughts for a proper post:

The Lama Temple (Yongchegong)

Rooftop detail at the Lama Temple

A foggy and rainy day at the Forbidden City

The yummy Xiaolongbao (or Siew Long Bun) is a Shanghai
specialty but can also be found in Beijing (we tried it at Din Tai Fung restaurant)

Brown rice milk tea at Chamate, a Taiwanese tea house chain,
with loads of milk & bubble teas on the menu

Glutinous rice with sesame filling from the Yunnan region at South Silk Road
(a restaurant in the Hou Hai area of Beijing)

The beautiful and compact Ri Tan Park

I could have spent all day sipping tea and watching the world
go by at the peaceful Stone Boat Cafe (Ri Tan Park)

Killer hike at the Great Wall: 10km of ups and downs from Jingshanling
to Simatai, both unspoilt locations


Tea madness! Clockwise from left:

Tie Guan Yin (Fujian), "Red Robe" Oolong,
Roast Tie Guan Yin (Hong Kong), "Osmanthus" Oolong,
the "usual suspect" Jasmine flavored tea,
Pu'er (Yunnan) and Dragon Well (nutty green tea)

Thou Shall Have Lousy Seats

Pearl Jam tickets:
notoriously hard-to-get, even for The Simpsons

When I heard earlier this week that Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, the ultimate baritone rock god was going to do a mini North America solo tour I knew I needed my share of it. I am a dedicated PJ/EV fan and this is his first solo tour EVER! Those who follow his side projects and are familiar with his Golden Globe winning soundtrack for the movie "Into the Wild" know this is a huge deal!

So off to the Internet to check my remaining BA miles availability, sort out accommodation in New York, etc. etc. All good. It was just the "small" matter of getting the tickets. I knew that part would not be easy, having previously gone through a via crucis to secure a pair of tickets for the 2003 Pearl Jam concert in MSG/New York and another for the club fan gig they did in London two years ago. Getting these tickets was ten times more stressful (but also ten times more rewarding) than my job - and I am a banking lawyer!

In case you don't know, New Yorkers and their neighbours are crazy about all things Pearl Jam (such good taste they have!). I suspect the Tri-State area has one of the biggest concentrations of hard core, old time Tenclubbers (ie. the fan club members). Out of the 3 gigs Eddie is scheduled to be playing I only needed tickets for the New Jersey one, for which I thought there would be less demand. But as soon as the tickets went on sale I realized my naivety: having initially secured excellent seats, the browser just keep crashing on me and off went my goodies basket. Each time I tried to log back in I felt like a surfer caught inside a big set of waves, having to dive down to avoid the whitewater scramble. The modest New Jersey Performing arts centre online systems just could not cope with the stampede. Phone lines were dead. How I missed the sturdiness of Ticketmaster...

In the end Mr. R and I had to contend with the bread crumbs as usual: the high-up-in-the-gods, bring-your-oxygen-masks type of tickets, but at least we did not leave empty handed! As I left the NJPAC site I went window shopping at the ticket brokers' and saw markups of 200% on good seats. Ouch!

No matter how limited ticket allowances are, the touts always seem to get good seats to resell, I wonder if there is any kind of poetic justice for cyberspace? Still, I am very much looking forward to hearing Eddie's velvety voice live once again...

The End of the Affair

Remember that Sex and the City episode where writer Berger breaks up with Carrie via post-it note (it said: "I'm sorry, I can't, don't hate me")?

Well imagine if Carrie Bradshaw, in her emotional turmoil, had decided to contact various women of different backgrounds and professions: a lawyer, a dancer and several performing artists, a journalist, a literary critic, a mother and even a rifle shooter, asking each of them to give their personal interpretations of the end of the affair (and the peculiar mode of communication)?

That's exactly what real life conceptual artist Sophie Calle did when her boyfriend (like Berger, also a writer) sent her a break-up email. She compiled 107 responses she got from her female allies and set up a multimedia exhibition, which appeared in the 2007 Venice Biennale and more recently in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris:





If you missed the exhibition's final round you may still want to try this nifty pink catalogue. Containing illustrations, bound-in booklets, bright green envelopes with DVDs and even Braille and Morse code versions of the dreaded email, it's a precious item for anyone who has ever obsessed about matters of the heart...

One, Two, Three... Singing by numbers

Carry the Zero (Built to Spill)

Made first, never forget (Tahiti 80)

One (U2)

First It Giveth (Queens of the Stone Age)

First Wave Intact (Secret Machines)

Once (Pearl Jam)

Expresso 2222 (Gilberto Gil)

I am Two People (Morrissey)

12D3 (Gorillaz)

3's & 7's (Queens of the Stone Age)

Four Sticks (Led Zeppelin)

Four Walled World (Temple of the Dog)

Two Hundred More Miles (Cowboy Junkies)

Cinco Minutos (Marisa Monte)

Il est Cinq Heures, Paris S' Eveille (Jacques Dutronc)

Five Ten Fiftyfold (Cocteau Twins)

Six Shooter (Queens of the Stone Age)

Six Barrel Shotgun (Black Rebel Motorcycle Club)

Dead Road 7 (the Kills)

Seven Nation Army (The White Stripes)

Driver 8 (REM)

Eight Line Poem (David Bowie)

Cloud 9 (George Harrison)

Nine Million Rainy Days (Jesus and Mary Chain)

A Thousand Hours (The Cure)

AF607105 (Charlotte Gainsbourg)

Back to the 101 (Albert Hammond Jr.)

Before Three (the Cure)

Blister 2000 (Violent Femmes)

Lot 105 (Blur)

M62 Song (Doves)

Neighbourhood numbers 1/2/3/4 (Arcade Fire)

No 13 Baby (Pixies)

Obstacle 1 & Obstacle 2 (Interpol)

One Hundred Years (The Cure)

Pop Song '89 (REM)

Rebel Music - 3 o'clock (Gilberto Gil)

Revolution 80 (Tahiti 80)

Room a Thousand Years (Soundgarden)

Seventeen Seconds (The Cure)

Song 2 (Blur)

Song Seven (Interpol)

Ten Years Gone (Led Zeppelin)

The Big 3 Killed my Baby (The White Stripes)

Three Days (Jane's Addiction)

Twenty Four Hours (Joy Division)

Two-Timing Touch and Broken Bones (The Hives)

Um a Um (Tribalistas)

Veinte Anos (Buena Vista Social Club)

Voo 2364 (Nana Vasconcelos)

Walls n. 3 (Tom Petty)

With My Own Two Hands (Ben Harper)

You Only Live Once (The Strokes)

1/2 Full (Pearl Jam)

5:55 (Charlote Gainsbourg)

5:15 (The Who)

12:51 (The Strokes)

15 Minutes (the Strokes)

22 Grand Job (The Rakes)

25 Minutes to Go (Johnny Cash)

40 ft (Franz Ferdinand)

50 ft Queenie (PJ Harvey)

666 Conducer (Black Rebel Motorcycle Club)

300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues (The White Stripes)

1921 (The Who)

1992 (Blur)

Wrong Number (The Cure)

If your life were a movie, which director would film it?

Your Score: Woody Allen

Your film will be 77% romantic, 38% comedy, 26% complex plot, and a $ 38 million budget.

Be prepared to have your life story shot entirely in New York City -- though lately Woody's been loving shooting in London [NB: how obliging!]. Also, your music soundtrack is all jazz from before 1949. Filmography: Annie Hall, Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Everyone Says I Love You, Match Point, Scoop, etc.

Woody has released one film per year consistently for the past 35 years. For the past 15 years he's been trying to make films like his older, funnier ones, just like characters in his Stardust Memories film suggest throughout. Regardless of his personal life, his films are American classics.

Try it yourselves: The Director who films your life test

Holding My Breath For Tim Winton

Laird Hamilton at Jaws
(source: stills from Riding Giants)

You know that recurring dream where you are faced with an impending test you have not studied for? Well, in a more naturalistic version of this dream, as I stand by the sea, I am faced with a fearful big wave surging upwards and I feel half powerless, half spellbound. That may sound at least as scary as the school test, but oddly enough I always wake up from it feeling stress free and sunny. The more I am dwarfed by that wall of water, the biggest my fascination. Sometimes during my dream the wave will stand still for a moment and I manage to look at the beast in the eye and then outrun it (barely!) before it explodes onto the shore with feral force.

The fact that I grew up in Rio de Janeiro partly explains my obsession with the sea. Over there agitated waters are a constant and it can be fun to gather around the shore to watch big swells (my paternal grandmother was also fascinated by them). Sometimes the raging Atlantic causes mayhem, as waves lick the ocean drive and cars and passers-by are sprayed. Occasionally tragedy strikes such as the late eighties swell which claimed the life of British young dancer Graham Bart, who drowned engulfed by a furious wave as he watched the ocean from a dangerous spot. Me and my family had often seen him in performance and I remember we were very saddened and in complete shock.

Big mouth: Laird and the biggest "lip" at Teahupoo

I see rough seas as a contradiction of nature: so threatening and at the same time so harmonious, as waves may rise and peel down beautifully (see Teahupoo picture above). That's why I have always found surfing so fascinating, initially purely as a spectator (to me it has the same aesthetic appeal as dancing - surfers are to water what dancers are to music) and many years later as an occasional participant - but one strictly confined to gentle waves. I have absolutely no aspiration, or skill, to tackle anything seen as "big" and thus I am happy to take my dose of radical sports adrenaline purely from watching or reading the surf adventures of demigod Laird Hamilton or those of Jeff Clark at Mavericks.

Man and Beast: where is Jeff Clark?

While there are plenty of interesting documentaries about surfing (Riding Giants, Step into Liquid, Endless Summer, Thicker Than Water...) it's hard to find compelling, well written books on the same topic. Other than short stories (Zero Break) or collected surf magazine articles (such as "The Big Drop") the best I have come across until now is Daniel Duane's "Caught Inside", a memoir of his "year spent surfing" and doing little else in Santa Cruz. Sounds very simple yet this is a book so eloquent and full of poetic imagery it earned Duane the moniker of "Henry David Thoreau on a fiberglass board". Agreed, but that's still a personal memoir, not fiction.

How refreshing then to stumble upon Tim Winton's latest novel "Breath" - which according to the Times Literary Supplement tackles surfing as a radically aesthetic life choice and dwells on the themes of fear and friendship, loneliness and boredom, the lure and danger of life lived intensely. Sounds compelling enough. Time to park all the feminist prose I have been reading of late (thanks to the arrival of Persephone Books in Kensington!), and embrace a sea change. More later...

5 Cool Things to do on a rainy day in Covent Garden...

Brace yourselves for another sunny summer!

... that do not involve flighting your way through the overly crowded, overly touristic, overhyped central market area:

1 - Stock up on exotic confectionery sourced from all over the world at Cybercandy. There's always something to keep you safely away from candy bar boredom. Some of my favorites: Green Tea Kit Kats from Japan, Cherry Ripes (a cherry flavoured Aussie version of the Bounty bar) and M&Ms in "Razzberry" flavour.

2 - Find yourself some vintage treasures at Rokit, Pop Boutique and others

3 - Sample a mix of Brazilian and Portuguese comfort food at Canela cafe (the chicken pie is simple and delicious) or, if it's sugar you crave, pop in for an impossibly cute candy muffin at one of London's most colorful coffee shops: Candy Cakes.

4 - Window shop at unashamedly girlie designer stores Koh Samui and Orla Kierly

5 - Cut the distance between audience and actors by half at the pocket-sized Donmar Warehouse. There's always a quality production on.