Sunday, May 27, 2007

A cinq heures cinquant-cinq

I came to Paris to spend the long weekend, and rented a car to wander around. I had learned from my previous stint in France that driving around Paris (instead of taking the subway) is a priceless pleasure - you get stuck in traffic, that's a fact, but you're surrounded by so many mesmerizing pieces of sculpture and architecture that it feels like a stroll in an art gallery. As I say, in Paris, I don't care about getting lost (which I often do), cause there's always a pleasant new scenery to look at from the car window.

Yet another thing I recall from when I lived in France is that the joys of Parisian wanderings are enhanced by a fitting soundtrack. I used to drive from Fontainebleau to Paris, stuck for ages in A6 and the Périférique, but to the tune of chansons françaises like "L'Eté Indien", "L'Envie d'Aimer" and "En Se Retrouvera" it felt like touring, not commuting. This weekend, though, I found myself with a rental car, but no soundtrack.

There are harder problems in life than that, I know, and that one was easily solved as I stepped into my long-time favourite Fnac store at the Forum Les Halles mall and headed for the "Noveau" shelves. I spotted Charlotte Gainsbourg' debut album, "5:55", which I had read about somewhere, and decided to give it a try. After listening to it some 3 or 4 times in one day, I got completely addicted and can't let it go.



I wouldn't be able to label it, honestly - something like mood music with virtuoso pianos mixed to electronic drum beats - but it is marked, above all, by Charlotte's delicate voice, whispered in a way that lend the songs an intimate and sexy edge. It sounds like she in a room, looking through a window in a rainy afternoon, while her lover takes a nap in the bed.

Lyrics that talk about love and worship to the lover accentuate the sensuality, like in "Everything I cannot see", the "poppiest" track. But the lyrics of the title song (and arguably best track) dwells on a different level - "5:55" talks about subconscience, about being half-awake and half-asleep at the same time. It is a song I would like to wake up to every day.

Given my enjoyment on the first 24 hours of ownership of this album, expect plenty more about it in the days to come in this page.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

And you'll never walk alone....



When you walk through a storm
Hold your head up high
And don't be afraid of the dark
At the end of the storm
Is a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of a lark

Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Tho' your dreams be tossed and blown
Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you'll never walk alone
You'll never walk alone

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

the game.

Full stop.

Everyone is talking about the midfield battle - but with both teams probably fielding three defensively minded midfielders each, I actually think it'll be a match decided on the sides. Especially given Finnan's outstanding season.

I predict a 2-1 Liverpool victory. Milan up front in first half with Kaka.Second half Milan is all on counter-attack but we draw through a Stevie G belter from outside, and seal sixth trophy with a header from substitute Peter Crouch, in a cross coming from the right - either by Finnan or Pennant.

Oh, crystal ball, crystal ball,...

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Lunch with Gore Vidal

I am probably infringing some sort of copyright law by pasting here this extremely amusing interview with Gore Vidal, published in this weekend's edition of the Financial Times , but, anyway.

I'd feel worse by preventing people from freely reading this. And honestly, I guess so would Mr. Vidal.


Lunch with the FT: Gore Vidal
By Victor Mallet

Published: May 18 2007 18:51 | Last updated: May 18 2007 18:51


Gore Vidal is ensconced in his wheelchair in a corner of the Mandarin Grill, Martini at his elbow, by the time I run up the stairs of Hong Kong’s most venerable hotel to meet him. Daren Simkin, his young assistant, has got there before me with his charge and is nursing a beer on the far side of the table.

I am eager to know what the famously witty Vidal is really like, but his clothes - grey suit, Paisley tie - and his imperturbably regal manner, disturbed only by a loose quiff of white hair, give nothing away. His first words do not help. As if to put the journalist interviewer at ease, Vidal launches unprompted into a series of reminiscences about his late friend Gavin Young, correspondent for the Observer during the Vietnam war. ”He was absolutely fearless because he was drunk all the time,” drawls Vidal.

Somewhat nonplussed - I never knew Young - I turn the conversation to Hong Kong. ”The one thing I most hate in the world is shopping,” Vidal replies promptly. ”I have no interest in retail goods. What draws most people here repels me.” I think we are going to get on.

The 81-year-old American writer has a curious reputation among Europeans born a generation later: he is the famous author that people feel they ought to have read but usually have not. I had struggled to find his works in Hong Kong, but in Melbourne I was luckier and found him represented in almost every section of a bookshop, including history, politics, fiction and biography.

Vidal the author thus resists pigeonholing. Vidal the political and social commentator is easier to pin down. Scion of a political family and a failed politician himself, he can be guaranteed to be colourfully scathing about George W. Bush and to defend liberal values: among other achievements, he wrote The City and the Pillar (1948), one of the first post-war novels to deal with homosexuality.

The author is in town to publicise Point to Point Navigation, his new memoir, at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. He orders half a dozen oysters, a Bloody Mary and Dover sole, while I opt for an artichoke soup, the sole and a glass of wine.

Vidal explains that he is taking a break from campaigning in the US for the Democrats, although campaigning against the Republicans would be a more accurate description, given his low opinion of both sides. Surely, I ask, President Bush cannot be as stupid as many foreigners believe?

Vidal is adamant that he is, that the American right effectively staged a coup d’etat after 9/11, that there is a constitutional crisis in which the republic has been replaced by an empire, and that there is a case for impeaching Bush. ”Once you’re imperial you have an emperor and once you have that you’re finished,” he says, recalling his recent reading of Aristotle’s Politics. ”And that has been our condition, taken advantage of by a bunch of sleazy gas and oil hustlers.”

If there is one thing that incenses Vidal about his fellow Americans it is ignorance. Bush, he says, ”knows nothing and he doesn’t want to know anything. He has no curiosity. Have you watched him speak? That little-boy face, mouth ajar, dazed eyes. The rumour round Washington is that he’s gone back to drinking. Well, thank God, he might make a little more sense. A group of us each vowed we would send him a bottle of whisky, but I think it’s heroin probably that he would need.”

He pauses briefly to ask the chef, who has approached our table with an amuse-gueule of truffled lobster and avocado, if he remembers Gavin Young. The young Scotsman is even more bemused than I.

Then it is back to politics, the crisis facing America and the folly of detention without trial. ”A few weeks ago, the administration got rid of Magna Carta and habeas corpus... That is Mr [Alberto] Gonzales, our Attorney-General, who thinks he’s Attorney-General of Mexico. Where he belongs. No, that is not a racist remark. But it’s on the edge.”

This offensive remark is deliberate, calibrated. Vidal sometimes gives the impression of trying too hard to deliver the perfect bon mot for a dictionary of quotations. I can almost see him placing inverted commas around his own words. Asked a little later whether he wants to be remembered as a writer or a political figure, he explicitly offers me something to quote: ”I couldn’t care less how I’m remembered. People who go in for posterity have none.” By the evening, speaking from a stage at the University of Hong Kong, Vidal has polished his answer to the posterity question. ”As far as I can tell, posterity has done nothing for me. I’m going to do nothing for it.”

But Vidal the lunchtime orator is beginning to warm up as his oysters arrive. Not for nothing did Howard Austen, his recently deceased friend of more than half a century, call him Me Me.

”Since I’ve known most of the American historians, I never took seriously anything they wrote. Therefore I wrote 20 novels based on American history because I wanted it to be accurate,” Vidal says. ”I address the crisis facing us, that we are the most hated nation on earth, and I am one of the big explainers of what we have done. Other writers can’t do it because they don’t know anything about the history of the United States, much less Islam, Saladin, Genghis Khan, Mao Zedong.”

He interrupts his self-praise briefly with praise for his Bloody Mary (”Bliss, absolute bliss, fresh tomato”), before returning to his theme. ”I said [Bush] would be the most hated president in our history. It didn’t take much prescience to do that, and still people come up to me in airports and say, ’How did you know that about him?’ And I always say, ’By the pricking of my thumbs, I can tell that evil this way comes.’ Americans are very superstitious” - Vidal is joking now, after his misquotation from Macbeth - ”and I am a witch.”

So is Bush stupid, or evil? Surely there’s a difference? ”He has acted in an evil way is the most I can say about him. Anybody who has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East is an evil man. If he was suddenly called up at Nuremberg, which I would love to see happen, he’d say, ’I don’t know. They didn’t tell me that.’”

Do any of the likely presidential candidates offer more hope? ”Nobody’s any good. Hillary’s the brightest.” Barack Obama? ”He’s pretty... he could very well sweep the election. The country is so anti-black and is dying to vote for one as a form of redress.”

The arrival of the two Dover soles for Vidal and me, and a giant ribeye steak for Daren, marginally lightens the mood at the table. US politics, I suggest, seem a bit depressing. ”More than a bit,” replies Vidal, then adds in mitigation: ”Perfect asparagus.” But does he have anything cheerful to say about the world, Mandarin Grill aside? Was he always this dyspeptic?

”I wrote a book called The Golden Age, which was about 1945 when we all got out of the army. There was a burst of energy in all the arts and I thought finally America’s going to develop a civilisation, and how wonderful it is to be at the beginning of it. And then we didn’t. The Korean war started, and we’ve been in war ever since. That cooled my sincerity about optimism.”

Vidal may be an egotist but he has carefully avoided talking about his own feelings. I suggest cautiously that he seems rather British in the way he conceals his emotions. He puts it down to class, not country. We talk about how Jackie Kennedy was criticised for not weeping at her husband’s funeral and about the film The Queen, in which Helen Mirren (another old friend) plays Queen Elizabeth as she comes under fire for not grieving publicly at the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

I venture that the most moving part of his latest book is his description of Austen’s death, a chapter that ends with the nurse weeping and the tearless Vidal writing: ”I envied him - the WASP glacier had closed over my head.” So he would like to weep, but cannot? ”Yes,” he concedes. ”I feel like it, but I don’t, I can’t. People who weep, I envy. After all, I spent most of my life in Italy... They get rid of everything, they weep all the time.”

Neither religion (he is appalled by it and is a fan of the atheist Confucius) nor sex (he claims he never did it with friends anyway) provides much comfort for the ageing Vidal, famous for advising people never to miss a chance to have sex or appear on television. ”It’s a joke, but my jokes are taken literally because I come from a literal country,” he says. ”Aids has disabused me of the values of casual sex.”

Dessert arrives, followed by cognac for him and calvados for me. Simkin hurriedly passes a pill to the diabetic Vidal as his spoon hovers over a sugary hazelnut creme brulee. As the restaurant empties, our two-and-a-half-hour lunch drifts pleasantly on with anecdotes from Vidal about a beautiful Indian Maharani in Jaipur, a bridge-playing British diplomat in Mongolia and a Hennessy brandy heiress.

Later that day - when talking at the university - he says something that I recognise as quintessential Gore Vidal. Asked about the greatest moment of his life, he replies: ”The one thing Cassandras like to be is right. The numerous times I’ve been able to say, ’I told you so’ - that is joy.”

At lunch I ask him whether he regrets not going to university after the war. ”Are you crazy? Would you rather be a published author, lecturing at Harvard, than going to Harvard?” he replies. ”All my ex-classmates were majors in the air force, that sort of thing, and there they were, juniors at Harvard. I went up there to speak, and half the audience were people I’d been at school with a few years before - and the waves of hatred that I felt coming up towards me from the audience! It was the highest moment of my life.”

It is, of course, another Gore Vidal joke. But, like a lot of his jokes, it is laced with venom, arrogance and a hefty dose of truth.

Victor Mallet is the editor of the FT’s Asia edition.

Mandarin Grill, Hong Kong

6 oysters
1 x artichoke soup
1 x organic salad
2 x Dover sole
1 x Australian ribeye steak
2 x hazelnut creme brulee asparagus, mashed potato
1 x apple crumble
1 x dry Martini
1 x Bloody Mary
2 x glasses of Sauvignon Blanc
1 x Tsingtao beer
1 x cognac
1 x calvados
mineral water
coffee

Total: HK$4,273.50 (₤277.93)

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Genesis

It has been almost 3 years now since Sebastião Salgado launched a project called Genesis. In it, the famous photographer wanted to go to all sorts of remote corners of the planet, and give us a glimpse of what life used to be before mankind took over and started changing nature.

In that journey, he has so far taken astonishing pictures of Antarctica, Patagonia, Galápagos, Xingu, Namibia, Sudan, Rwanda, and, latest, Kamchatka peninsula in Russia. A selection of some of these pictures can be found at the Guardian.

All of the trademark black-and-white stills are jaw-dropping. Like these penguins gathering on an iceberg in Antarctica.

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Allez le rouge et blanche

Yesterday night I stood on the Kop, holding my red scarf, and sung "You'll Never Walk Alone", as the home players ran around the field thanking the supporters for their intensive cheering during the electrifying Cup semi-final that had just ended.

No, I wasn't at Anfield. No, I'm not fantasizing on it either.

I was invited by my friend Jan to watch his team, Standard de Liege, play Anderlecht on the second leg of the demi-finale of Coupe de Belgique. Standard had won the first leg away 0-1, a surprise result given that Anderlecht is the current league leader and constant Champions League participant.

Besides eating French fries with mayonnaise in the rain while drinking a couple of pints of Jupiler, I watched a very entertaining match with a fantastic atmosphere. Unfortunately I didn't take my camera, so I will illustrate with some pics from Standard's website.



First half

Standard played on a 4-4-2 with a midfield a la anglaise - relying heavily on the industry of their central midfielders, Belgian teenagers Defour and Fellaini. Their strategy consisted of exchaging side passes in the opposition midfield till it reached one the team's two most skilled players - right midfield Sergio Conceição and centre forward Jovanovic.

Backed not only by the relentless chant of the self-called Kop, but also by noteworthy performances of their almost flawless centre-backs (Brazilian Dante, former Juventude player, and Senegalese Sarr), Standard pushed forward, and should have scored on the first half. But actually only Jovanovic showed some willingness to shoot, the others being a bit too reluctant when near the area.

Anderlecht was keeping it tight with a line of three in the midfield, right in front of the back line. And though the three up front were always ready to launch counter-attacks, their most dangerous player was Argentine right-midfield Biglia - who a couple of times cauught Standard's left back lost in marking and appeared to shoot.

Second half

Anderlecht endured till the break but were surprised by a goal at minute 46. I was surprised as well - I heard the crowd yell but I was actually still at the toilet at the time. When I sat, I saw an Anderlecht onslaught - they had nothing to lose anyway - which ended up in a goal by minute 60.

Standard's coach then reacted by taking off Jovanovic's partner in attack (Lukunku, an ineffective tall centre-forward) and replacing him with Portuguese elder Sá Pinto. Guess what, it worked. He helped regain midfield in a time when Anderlecht was regaining confidence. And, most importantly, he earned a penalty "from heaven" when stealing the ball from a centre-back and stopped by the keeper.

The subsequent goal was cold water to Anderlecht but sparked the Kop. From then on, Standard fans were more worried about coordinating the Mexican wave and the Ole chant.

The fans

Liege is in a French-speaking part of Belgium, and hence the chants were another foray into my learning of français. Not that they were too elaborate:

"Hey! Hey! Tous ensemble, tous ensemble!"

"Allez les rouges... allez les rouges... allez le rouge et blanche..."


And also some other chants that I couldn't really understand. Best one was a sequence of sentences uttered by one side of the stadium, and repeated 3 seconds later by the other, that ended up with a massive "Ole ole" chant.



The stadium resembled La Bombonera - tall, steep stands, with ribbons, flags and banners flying, as you can see in the pic above. I was on a seat in the third floor, but the side of the field, not in the Kop. By the way that is one thing I was likened to Standard - they look up to Liverpool, with the stands, the nonstop cheering, and the playing of You`ll Never Walk Alone in the End. Unbelievable.

Saturday, last home match of the season against Club Brugge (who Standard will play in the Cup final, in 10 days) - I'm there!!! Tous ensemble, tous ensemble!!!

Saturday, May 05, 2007

Indulging in mainstream tourism

When traveling on leisure, I try to avoid becoming a tourist stereotype. I consider myself past the stage of being a camera-toting vacationer, taking all sorts of pictures to post on fotolog to my mama. And I guess I've also grown a bit old and picky for the rough nights that generally accompany the "off-the-beaten-track" journeys - which, generally, are full of camera-toting vacationers anyway.

Still, it is hard not to indulge myself on a bit of mainstream sightseeing when I had one afternoon to walk around a city as nice as Brugge. Especially when in company of my friends Nicolas and Carolina, camera-toters to the core, but in a way that makes it seem quite a cool thing to do.

So here you have myself striking a pose over one of Brugge's many canals.