…play on! The importance of sustenance at home, rations on the road and the dreaded promoters dinner. Culinary memories of Kraft macaroni and slaughtering your own meal with Ivan Smagghe, Simian Mobile Disco, Deepgroove, Shaun Reeves, Bones and Heidi.
Featuring performances from 2020Soundsystem live at We Love – Ministry of Sound London, Ivan Smagghe in the Discoteca for We Love Space and DJ Hell in London also.
The Vain Collective is a fashion blog and resource of the chicest order. Curated by friend of the family Kellydeene Skerritt based in London. The concept is vain vs pain i.e. good veers bad. It’s full of cult labels as well as the more well known designers. There’s also a couple of articles on home-made fashion which can teach you how to customize some basic one-we-made-earlier type pieces. There’s even some fashion analysis of pop music videos to peruse too.
J'aime la discoteque
From a man whose appetite knows ever increasing bounds. Be unsurprised that this consumption occurred over the course of just seven days. He is eating for two now after all, with Stella on the way. Regards to La Bodega, Forno Antico, Cafe Sidney, La Vinera and Croissant Show.
A pizza de action
I scream
Cake club
A lily bit too much to drink
Never meagre in Bodega
Cheese meats bread
Birthday buns
Choco-late than never
Food is a blessing and a curse. It comforts, it coaxes but it bites and after the childhood years of eating food for fun we use food as a crutch and it’s payback…or a fat back. Equally depressing. Thing is diets are dumb and there are few things more soul destroying than calorie counting, low fat dairy or ‘portion control’. If you can’t eat for pleasure, what is the point of living?
I couldn’t have put it better myself. Shelly Preston’s fledgling Shelly and Ice Cream blog talks about food and cooking in a way which resonates with my own deep love for all things gastronomical. Her recipes are clear, concise and personable and along with the tempting introductions are sure to get even the novice chef in the mood for cooking. Take, for example, her Peas Louise version of the English classic:
God I love pea soup but it’s a real divider, especially when it’s made with ham hock. It’s a love hate soup for sure. I mostly associate pea soup with summer which is daft because we don’t have to wait until then. Frozen peas are a dream in soups; much better in fact that pod-fresh. Peas contain a high level of complex carbohydrates and bags of fibre. It’s the carbohydrates that make them naturally sweet which is why babies will happily have them introduced to their plate before any other green vegetable. I used to make this for my husband all the time before we got married…I think it sealed the deal and admittedly, it’s lifted directly from my friend Jane’s book. It’s an all-round nutritional and winter winner because it’s made with fresh fennel bulb. The aromatic, anise like flavour of fennel just clicks with peas and not unlike celery it has a warming effect on the body. When I eat this soup I end up with cheeks like belisha beacons as the embers of the fennel glow, rest and digest in my stomach. Packed with vitamin C and phytonutrients, it’s a bumper boost for your immune system too. Glow make it, it’s dead easy.…continue reading.
easy peasy
Along side her savoury selections Shelly is also a master chocolatier. Founder of Boutique Aromatique, her fine fragrant chocolates are now available at Nottingham’s Speciality & Gourmet Food Market. They are delicate and light but with the deep and heady flavours required for any truly good chocolate. Gizzi Erskine says about them:
Boutique Aromatique are masters of artisan chocolates. You can taste the best ingredients and Shelly has her finger on the pulse with inventive and well thought out flavours. The chocolate of the future.
Having previously worked with world class aromatherapists and perfumers, Shelly has transposed many of the same techniques and subtleties into her chocolate making; garnering praise, and orders, from connoisseurs and sweet toothed celebrities alike.
When I left music 8 years ago I went on an exploratory mind/body odyssey, taking all kinds of classes from anatomy & physiology to herbalism, reading everything in sight and became a bit of a yoga and whole foods obsessive. I started a new career as Product Developer in the holistic/wellbeing industry conceptualising/developing/researching and sourcing everything from green tea and incense to vitamins and essential oils. I was concerned for a long time about the provenance, grade and ethics of the ingredients and materials I was using and it was through meeting and collaborating with some of the real authorities in aromatherapy and essential oils, herbs and natural perfumery that I developed my own affinity for top drawer aromatics – it became a case of, only the best will do. Alongside my work I was also becoming aware of the (then) underground fine chocolate movement and ‘real’ chocolate became my all-consuming passion. I researched cocoa like a demon, trained to be a chocolatier, built a lab in my house and three years ago decided to move in to chocolate full-time and founded Boutique Aromatique – fine fragrant chocolate – which fuses my love of aromatics and chocolate. I work only with the finest, ethical chocolate and the most flavoursome and complex, single origin beans and the finest, top drawer aromatics (that are blended to scale as in perfumery) herbs, fruits and spices. The result is an aromatic encapsulation of the two things I love the most and thank goodness people seem to like what I’m doing…so far! – Shelly Preston
Invisible City Issues 1 - 6
Each issue covers a different topic, such as blindness, mapping or bodies (in issues 3, 5 and 4 respectively). It’s free to download and definitely worth a look so we’ve compiled the first six issues for you to download here.
Download – Invisible City Issues 1 to 6
Invisible City – Official Site
In other words, forget academic rigor. Never take the appropriate next step. Talk about Chinese urban design, the European space program, the landscape in the films of Alfred Hitchcock in the span of three sentences – because it’s fun, and the juxtapositions might take you somewhere. Most importantly, follow your lines of interest. Finally, I want to reiterate that BLDGBLOG is fundamentally about following, and not being ashamed by, your own enthusiasms, whether or not they are rigorous and appropriate for the academic mores of the day, or even interesting for your family and friends. – Geoff Manaugh
High Houses are proposed as part of the reconstruction of Sarajevo after the siege of the city that lasted from 1992 though late 1995.
Arctic glacial core samples
No need for a pachyderm
Torture – any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him information, exacting revenge, deterring others from doing certain things and in some cases just for the hell of it. Throughout history civilisations have come up with more and more elaborate and grotesque ways of torturing people, often implemented by the people in power as a form of policing. Old classics come to mind like the thumb screw and the rack, but some techniques long since disregarded offer a glimpse at how abhorrent law enforcement would have been. Even in today’s societies certain inhumane techniques, such as sleep deprivation and solitary confinement, are used on people who are, by law, innocent until proven guilty. Although of course the law stipulates that when techniques like this are used to ensure justice they are not forms of torture.
Some of our favourites ‘golden oldies’ are:
Death of a thousand cuts
Slow slicing – Slow slicing also translated as the slow process, the lingering death, or death by a thousand cuts, was a form of execution used in China from roughly AD 900 until its abolition in 1905. In this form of execution, the condemned person was killed by using a knife to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time. A particularly painful method of torture the victims would be kept alive for as long as possible whilst still having body parts removed.
Peine forte et dure – Death by crushing or pressing is a method of execution that has a history during which the techniques used varied greatly from place to place. This form of execution is no longer sanctioned by any governing body. A common method of death throughout South and South-East Asia for over 4,000 years was crushing by elephants. European countries will often swap the use of a pachyderm for a large rock or tree.
Dumbo's Revenge
Rat Torture – Rats may be used to torture a victim by encouraging them to attack and eat him alive. This is supposed to be a traditional form of Chinese punishment. The “Rats’ Dungeon” was a feature of the Tower of London alleged by Roman Catholic writers from the Elizabethan era. A cell below high-water mark and totally dark would draw in rats from the River Thames as the tide flowed in. The prisoner would in some instances have flesh torn from the arms and legs to encourage the rats to eat. Another method uses a pottery bowl filled with rats placed open side down on the naked body of a prisoner. When hot charcoal is piled on the bowl, the rats attempt to escape by gnawing into the very bowels of the victim.
Foot Roasting – Pretty self explanatory really, the prisoner is immobilised on his back and his bare feet are imprisoned in a stocks of wood or iron. The soles of his feet are smeared with lard — occasionally butter, and more recently even margarine and olive oil spread — and slowly barbecued over red-hot coals. A bellows is used to control the intensity of the heat, while a screen is interposed between the feet and the coals as questions are put; if the questions are not answered satisfactorily, the screen is withdrawn and the naked soles were exposed to the flames for an ever increasing period of time.
Rack 'em up
Water Torture – What is called the “Chinese water torture” was a torture described by Hippolytus de Marsiliis in the 16th century that was supposed to drive its victim insane with the stress of water dripping on a part of the forehead for a very long time. It may also be characterized by the inconsistent pattern of water drips. Supposedly, the desire for the human brain to make a pattern of the timing between the drops will also eventually cause insanity to set in.
Pharmalogical torture – Pharmalogical torture uses psychotropic and/or other chemicals to induce pain and cause compliance with a torturer’s goals. Another form is when the victim is forcibly injected with addictive drugs to have them become dependent, and then they’re denied the drug and forced to go through withdrawal unless they provide what the torturer wants.
They take planes and fly around, like the great soaring birds who endlessly cross and recross the ocean. Like the albatross, we are looking for our soul. Tourism is a rehearsal for death. – J.G. Ballard
Siteseeing
It is almost a cliché now that dream holidays in the developing world are taken with extreme care to shield the customer from local, depressing reality. The gulf between the lives of those in Haiti and those paying the privilege to float on the colossus currently at anchor at it’s shore is not a new thing, but the outrage did not seem to exist before the earthquake. Also, the conditions under which cruise workers toil to provide for passengers luxurious comforts can easily be found and applied for our own everyday comforts in sweatshops and factories from Central America to South East Asia (unless your lifestyle does not include coffee, imported clothes, petrol, plastics and any form of computer technology – we are all beneficiaries of global inequality). It’s just that, on a cruise ship the labour is just a few decks below.
Arlington Cemetry
Skullduggery
The proprietors of dark tourist sites are often keen to adopt a perspective of rationality, of both progress and historicism. However, the educative elements of their offerings are often tempered by an orientation toward income generation and commodification. Some sites may seem weird or perverted, but dark tourism allows travellers to mix history with a sort of psychological adventure, combining sentimental emotion with physical activity. Pilgrimage to sites such as Auschwitz, Lockerbie or Ground Zero is associated with the untimely death of many individuals . Our motivations are murky and difficult to unravel: a combination of reverence, voyeurism and the thrill of coming to close proximity with death. Often, the difference between the acceptable and unacceptable as a tourist attraction is only chronological distance; tours of Jack the Ripper’s London are very popular, however, a Yorkshire Ripper trail would be seen as highly inappropriate by most people. Over half a million people pass under the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign Auschwitz every year, the audience is given a two-and-a-half hour tour of the vast site. What a tourist can comprehend during such a brief visit is questionable. The operators of these sites are custodians of history and decide which parts of history to interpret and commemorate. It should be noted that the barbed wire and fences of the camp have been replaced many times due to corrosion, and human hair and other artifacts have been moved to Auschwitz from other concentration camps in order to provide a “better visitor experience”. Although abhorrent in their foundation, it is our own culture which decides what we will commemorate. Where, for example are the monuments and visitor centres to the genocide of American Indians or the first world peoples of Australia?
‘Dark tourism’ sites are important testaments to the consistent failure of humanity to temper our worst excesses and, managed well, they can help us to learn from the darkest elements of our past. But we have to guard against the voyeuristic and exploitative streak that is evident at so many of them.
Auschwitz – Tourism or Voyeurism?
Guardian.co.uk/travel/dark-tourism
“Men working on the river would move in time to the beat of the music. It was everywhere: on the street, in the church. In the tonks and barrel-houses where people went to be together. Like the beating of a big heart. It gave everyone a good feeling.”
The Cradle is Rocking is a delightful 12-minute film that, though somewhat damaged (Folkstreams has found what may be the only surviving print), is highly recommended viewing for anyone interested in American roots music: in this case, New Orleans jazz. The film’s thoughtful and affable narrator is trumpeter George “Kid Sheik” Cola. This full length version of the 12 minute film shows the damage on the only print available. The film was directed by Frank DeCola who died in the early 1970s. Frank was a talented filmmaker and composer and was enlisted in a program run by George Stevens Jr. during the Kennedy years. That program sponsored young filmmakers to make films for the United States Information Service, for showing abroad in USIA libraries. Tom Davenport was the cameraman on the project and it was shot in B&W 35mm film. Anthony Loeb was the producer. This print is from Tom Davenport’s collection and as you see, it is in bad shape.
Folkstreams is a national preserve of documentary films about American roots cultures streamed with essays about the traditions and filmmaking. The site includes transcriptions, study and teaching guides, suggested readings, and links to related websites.
