Falling Sky

April In The Kitchen

All sorts of things have been cooking in our kitchen over the last few weeks, thanks in no small part to some of the excellent books I was given for my birthday. Leiths Baking Bible, a gift from Stu & Andrea, is an absolute treasure trove of bakey goodness and I've already become hooked to parsnip and beetroot loaf cake, a surprisingly tasty and sweet cake that brings out the sweetness of the root vegetables. Might sound freaky at first, but no more so than carrot cake, and its proven a great use for excess beetroot and parsnips from the weekly veg delivery. There's also a cracking naan bread recipe in there that's become de riguer for curry nights and freezes nicely. Cheers guys - there'll always be a place for you at Nagl's Bagels.

Other treats are to be found in Rachel Allen's excellent Bake (she's like a Nigella Lawson who exists in our world and understands the focus should be on food, not lifestyle and cleavage) which does the remarkable job of containing recipes that aren't in the decent bundle of baking recipe books already wodged into our increasingly stuffed kitchen library. Case in point - the sweet potato and pecan loaf cake I made on Sunday. As with the aforementioned parsnip & beetroot loaf, the key ingredients are grated, giving texture and a intriguing sweetness - if you didn't know what was in it, you'd be very hard pressed to identify the sweet potato. Suggest the recipe and people will more often that not go "wuh?" or downright "eww!" but serve it to them unidentified and you're bound to get a definitive "NOM"... closely followed by "... what is that?" I've also used the white soda bread recipe a couple of times now for midweek bread. Considering I'm used to taking hours over the rising of bread, it's strangely unsettling to have a loaf that's made just by mixing flour, buttermilk, sugar and bicarbonate of soda then plonking it in the oven, but that's exactly what happens - and it works! The taste is reminiscent of scones and although it doesn't have the airyness of my usual white loaf, it's not particularly dense or heavy either and goes a treat with soup or jam. The recipe's here - go, print, try it, eat it!

As to non-bakey stuff, all sorts of stuff gets made during the weekdays when I don't have the light or patience to be taking photos or notes of what I'm making (the Lass is a lot better at that sort of thing - see Monday night's gobi from the superb Leon: Ingredients and Recipes). Still, on Saturday I was at the market and surprisingly pleased by the appearance of bunches of asparagus and rhubarb at the various veggie stalls. I completely scrapped what I'd planned to make that evening and instead used the immensely useful MacGourmet database on the iPod Touch (ooh, haven't wibbled about that yet) to find potential recipes involving both (though not at the same time, mind).

I ended up settling on a main course recipe from Denis Cotter's Wild Garlic, Gooseberries and Me (which has been raved about here before) - asparagus, spinach and Durrus cheese egg rolls with balsamic beetroot sauce, along with some avocado salsa from Cotter's Cafe Paradiso Cookbook. The ingredients list was pretty short by mains standards, but took a fair bit of work. Not perfect by any means - I overdid the balsamic beetroot sauce, as the photo below shows, giving it a much thicker, almost stodgy consistency rather than the smooth sauce desired - but the taste of the finished product was glorious, as full and tasty as I'd hope for from a restaurant.

As for the rhubarb, I turned to Sarah Raven's Garden Cookbook, finding a wonderfully simple recipe for rhubarb sorbet. Despite not having an ice-cream maker, it was still possible to make the sorbet over the course of the afternoon, and the finished product was excellent. The flavour was really strong but not over-powering, while the colour had such a rich brightness it was almost hard to believe it was 100% natural, but it certainly was, and will surely end up being served up to future guests at Castle Von Naggle.

Oh, and if nothing else, make these cookies. Get the cooking time right (ie keep it short) and they're downright perfect.

Paperback Painter

Or, judge a book by its cover.

I've not drawn or painted a single bleedin' thing since the year started, something which vexes me greatly yet the solution - get paper, get pencil, draw - keeps being avoided by me. Bloody stupid really. Hopefully it's down to recently starting a new job plus all the wedding preparations and I'll be feeling that much more creative in four weeks time, especially as the honeymoon is going to be ideal for (among other things) some serious sketchbook filling.

Still, let's look back to the heady days of summer 2008 when I received a friend forwarded on an email sent out by a friend of his looking for artwork for a book cover. The book was going to be her debut publication and the artwork would have to be unpaid. Normally I wouldn't be wasting valuable cookie-making time on creating artwork for free for people, but any friend of a friend is a friend of mine (unless they're an enemy and on the list, of course) and besides I'd been to the Notting Hill Carnival with her back in summer 2000 so she wasn't a complete stranger. It was a tough brief to work, not least as I wasn't getting penny one from it yet it still required hours of work (I ended up taking a couple of days holiday from work to focus on it) and it was basically a piece of painted illustration, something which I've never really done much of, especially with oils on canvas. The brief was basically: snakeskin boots with blood on (but not lots of blood, which could be off-putting to potential readers). The result: voila!

The book is called The Imperium of Steves, written by D.C. Pae (forename initials, not police) and published by Quartet Books - lookee to the right and you can see the link to Amazon where you can purchase it for a reasonable price. Although the painting above was done back in August I was asked to hold off on wibbling about it online until publication, which was a few weeks back. Turned out okay I think - it's a painting I'm happy to put my name to, despite the rush it was produced in. Painted using actual boots as reference along with various photo-reference online, the process of the painting can be seen below, from initial colour sketch to the final shebang.

The book itself I only had the chance to read in the last couple of weeks. It's a startling debut, reminiscent in spirit of Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory or the work of Chuck Paluhniak, particularly Rant (of which I thought The Imperium of Steves was superior). All things considered, those boots on the cover ought to be drenched in blood, the central character - in whose voice the story is told - a delusional psychopath. The tone shifts from black comedy to downright darkness, and I preferred the more farcical midsection with the suggestion that the eponymous Mr Steves was ludicrously deluded about his abilities or those around him. Still, it's a taut, demented, vicious read and well worth a look if you like a walk on the wilder, muckier, viscera-strewn side. And with a pretty cover too!

Out Of The Loop

While the next film review simmers and boils in my skull, here's an addition to yesterday's review of In The Loop - a 2 min deleted scene that's been plonked up on Empire.  Presumably set around 3/4s of the way through the film (though there's no spoilers to worry about) it's as verbally profane as you'd expect from a scene where Jamie is unleashed on a ministerial department.  Though the film doesn't suffer for its absence, it does feature some fascinating tension as Jamie comes up against someone who doesn't just cower down.

****!

In The Loop

After a poorly week of extreme sniffling, sending shares of Olbas Oil soaring, I'm pretty much back to normal. I'd planned on catching Let The Right One In on Monday, rather than a cold, so I'll be watching that today - first up, The Lass and I treated ourselves yesterday evening to dinner at the consistently excellent First Coast (the pan-fried coley was a cracker, fresh and succulent) before swanning over to the Cameo for the 18:30 of Armando Iannucci's debut film, In The Loop.

There's been plenty of advance word for this film over the last couple of weeks, especially with the astonishing clusterfuck at No.10 over Easter, a situation that so mirrored the climax to E6 of The Thick Of It that I kept waiting for the revelation that it was all an immense viral campaign rather than genuine, all the worse for being so damn stupid. Sadly not - but at least it served to demonstrate what politics makes of people, something at the core of In The Loop. Despite all the hype, the waiter at the restaurant hadn't heard of it, so just in case it's passed you by as well (and it'll all be new to all you lovely colonial readers, so dig in) here's the rumpus. In The Loop is a spin-off, progression, upgrade of the aforementioned BBC series The Thick Of It, a Yes Minister for the 21st century rated 18 solely for language. It focuses on the roles of ministerial advisors, spin-doctors, assistants, civil servants and how politics is not the work of some great conspiracy but rather the result of individuals stumbling along, each trying to keep their own head above the waters of chaos, events and the public, even (or especially) if that means pulling their colleagues under in the process. It all rings horribly true to anyone who's followed British politics over the last decade, and working in the civil service has done nothing to dispel such a notion. Nor do I believe it to be party-specific - what The Thick Of It and In The Loop do is show just what the political system requires of people, the duplicity required when buffeted by the media, ever-changing public opinion, out-of-control events. A world where things only get done through coercion, blackmail and threats.

In The Loop widens the scope from Whitehall to Washington and the bizarrely vague path to war, though the driving force behind it, as with the TV series, remains Malcolm Tucker, policy co-ordinator.  Not so much a human as a force of nature distilled into pure furious venom and shot out of a big fucking rocket, Tucker is played with eye-popping force by Peter Capaldi - here's a taste from TTOI. Any fears that the veritable onslaught of Tucker-spawned swearing - a word that really fails to convey the level of extreme hardcore verbal violence unleashed upon various poor sods - would be watered down in ITL for an international cinema audience are dispelled in the first few minutes when Tucker gets wind of a ministerial radio interview that clumsily veers off-message. And that's just the beginning. As The Wire showed so well, swearing when done right is both big and clever, deployed with invention, creating insults that surprise and delight in their surrealism, the flipside being the mouth-breathing dipshits that stagger around town whose every other word is fuck, as though communication only works when constantly interspersed with swearing. Gordon Ramsay no doubt imagines his cursing to be in the Tucker camp, but he's more like the latter, the same tedious words used over and over without a hint of wit, imagination or emotion, a boring bully (still, turns out The F Word actually stands for freezing, so nuts to him).

There's more to ITL than just naughty words though. The depiction of the random, slip-shod way that war is toppled into in an environment devoid of principle, foresight or direction looks horribly believable when you dig into the political machinations in the build-up to the Iraq invasion. Again, like The Wire it shows that those in power are no less fallible than us poor shlubs, yet the decisions they make, no matter how ill-informed or hasty, can go on to have shattering consequences, and the only people who can survive in the corridors of power are those who can ignore those consequences, blank out the responsibility, focused on their own continuing survival. How else could you sleep?

Watching ITL you'll laugh, no question - I honestly can't remember the last time I laughed that hard, that consistently at the cinema - but afterwards anger follows, a frustration that there could be even the slightest echo of truth in what was shown, that something as devastating as a war could really be borne out of such a self-centred, short-sighted system spinning out of control. All those funny naughty words are the sugar around this pill of anger, frustration and outrage. How the hell did things turn out like this, and how the hell can it be changed? Chums, I haven't got a clue.

That sense of helplessness might put some people off, but please don't let it. ITL doesn't lecture you, it merely shows how things almost certainly are - it lets you decide whether you're fine with that. Some are, some aren't. And, crucially, more than anything, it's very fucking funny and an absolute pleasure to watch in the cinema surrounded by laughter. Utterly relevant, In The Loop is the anti-Boat That Rocked, a demonstration that British film comedy doesn't have to be light, fluffy, thick as shit. Show that there's an audience for something this sharp and vote with your cinema ticket.

The Little Things In Life

Got 18 minutes handy to expand your noggin?  Course you have.  This is a presentation from TED (which I really should be keeping my eye on more) by Bonnie Bassler of the department of molecular biology at Princeton University.  She discusses how bacteria cells communicate with each other and the implications such knowledge has for treating infections and improving health.  It's remarkable stuff, conveyed effectively by the enthusiastic Bassler (interviewed here).

Doff of the hat to Onegoodmove for spotting this.  And while we're marvelling at what's going on at a microscopic level, ohh and ahh at these lovely images taken through an electron microscope of seeds and pollen conserved at the Kew Millennium Seed Bank Project.  Spotted by Sully.

A grain of red campion (Silene dioica) pollen.  Photograph: Rob Kesseler & Madeline Harley

A Hippy Nightmare

A brief yet powerful piece by the great Adam Curtis on how the narrative that news has tried to give conflict over the last few decades has completely broken down, leaving everyone feeling depressed, helpless and detached.  It's taken from the almost-as-great Charlie Brooker's Newswipe, currently the best damn thing on British telly (here's an iPlayer link).  Essential viewing for anyone with a working brain.

The Elbow Patented Goosebump Generator

Watch/play the following, and if you don't get a delightful shiver at that bit (you'll know it when you hear it) then, strewth, check your pulse or something.

Taken from the excellent Elbow at Abbey Road CD/DVD, wherein that there band plays The Seldom Seen Kid in its entirety with a little help from the BBC Concert Orchestra and über-choir Chantage.  It was recorded back in January this year and gives some already-brilliant songs a greater depth, emotional weight and all round wallop.  Previously available from Elbow's site, it's now up for sale at HMV and really should be snapped up by anyone with the original album.  Me, I reckon it's the definitive way to hear TSSK, a super-rare example of a live recording improving on the original, especially as the DVD is in lovely 5.1 surround sound for that what-the-deuce-are-they-doing-in-my-living-room feeling.

Life Ain't Nuthin' But Fillies And Farthings

Isn't modern life ghastly?  So much rudeness and crudeness, vulgarity and inanity, devoid of manners and sense?  Where once were men of honour and wit, we now find lads, grown adults with the minds of vile boys, bellowing and staggering around wretched town centres in vomit-spattered shirts, while women of grace and sophistication have been drowned out by ladettes, seemingly determined to out-drink, out-bellow and out-vomit their male counterparts, cackling, clawing and eventually catatonic in the back of an ambulance.  Is it any wonder that one reaches for solace in The Chap, Jeeves & Wooster and anything else that presents a politer, cheerier life seen through a rose-tinted monacle, albeit with the wryest of grins?

So it was that my ears were suitably pricked when listening to Tom Robinson on the wireless a couple of months back and heard the musical stylings of Mr B The Gentleman Rhymer.  Rich with banjo and beats, it's a thorougly well-spoken and geniuinely amusing hippity-hop ode to Tim Westwood, titled Timothy.  Hark ye!

Of course, mocking Westwood is as easy as shooting a morbidly obese tuna wedged in the proverbial barrel and has been going on for as long as there's been a wireless, so much so he's practically beyond parody, yet it's done with such panache that it feels fresh and funny, rather than reheated gags from a decade ago.  Further digging around in the depths of the British Library (oh, very well, Google) revealed Mr B to be a practitioner (thus far the sole practitioner) of chap-hop, described like so:

Aiming to dazzle with dignity, Mr. B takes to the stage with his Banjolele and stiff upper lip to perform ditties of pipe-smoking, high society, Cricket and sexual misadventure, as well as some more well-known pieces from the world of Hip-Hop, re-worked in true Chap-Hop fashion.

It also revealed that he had produced a complete long-player, Flattery Not Included, which I decided to acquire from the gentleman himself via the website (fie on thee, record companies!).  Blow me, it's a cracker!  There's certainly a novelty hilarity value to the whole thing, much like reading The Chap, the juxtaposition of plinky-plinky and boom-tiddly-boom working nicely while the well-written lyrics are a hoot, suitably enunciated and knowingly naive.  Unlike many novelty/comedy albums, however, this actually has staying power - the music is strong enough to stand on its tod and the words continue to amuse after numerous replays.  Some tracks are stronger than others, particular highlights for me being the Winehouse/Doherty-baiting The Crack Song, the awkward romantic shenanigans of Sherry Monocle ("I -  thought - you were an awful tease / but you - had - venereal disease!"), More Kissing In Porn Please, We're British with the plea "Why can't there be more kissing in porn? Where's all the romance gorn?" and the below funky number, a real treat.

Splendid!  Having given the above a spin or two, amble in a brisk but respectable fashion to his Myspace page, from whence you may purchase your very own copy of this splendid long player in shiny-shaving-mirror format (click on the big yellow Buy Now button and let nature take its course).  Perfect for playing loud as you cruise down the streets in your tricked-out 1928 Aston Martin.

Months Into Weeks

Six weeks and five days. The wedding clock, it ticketh. What's been happening lately?

Well - my shirt has been acquired. Actually, it was acquired in Brighton during my sojourn there, at the excellent Gresham Blake, but to ensure a better fitting a larger size was chosen, measured against me then adjusted and posted up a few days later. It's blue, it's long-sleeved and I'm going to wear a tie with it despite all my previous bleating. Therefore, a tie has also been acquired, though there's no thrilling story to go with it, eventually making do with the offerings of Edinburgh's George Street after many many attempts to locate a suitable Moomin tie, all failed. Still, the tie I've bought is nice enough and having tried on the suit, tie and jacket the other day it looks as though it all works together (the tell-tale look of "phwoaar" in the Lass's eyes was all the confirmation I wanted). Cufflinks have been ordered via Dawanda - I'll tell you which ones after the wedding, I'd like there to be a few surprises on the day - and should turn up in the next few days, so that's pretty much my clothing for the day sorted. Hurrah!

Cake arranged. It's going to be splendid indeed, but no more shall be said until the wedding. Again, another wee surprise.

The vows? Still to do. Easter weekend, that's the plan.

We've been putting the gift list together, even though it's very possible no-one will actually use the bounder (there is a crunch on, and goodness knows it's costing people enough just to travel to Edinburgh and stay there, especially on a fucking goddamn bastard bollocking rugby cup final weekend arrrrgh). Still, it's rather odd scurrying around the local John Lewis scanning anything we'd like (the vast majority are kitchen items, you'll be stunned to learn), a bit like rifling through the Argos catalogue before christmas as a kid.

Playlist for afternoon and evening remains in a fuzzy state of quantum flux, especially as every few days I hear/remember another song that somehow seems as essential as everything else in there. The recent arrival of the Tighten Up! Trojan Reggae Classics (1968 - 1974) compilation will probably send a few more reggae treats into the afternoon list, but at what cost? And when that ABBA box set arrives in a few days, what gems will that reveal?

Oh aye, and the paperwork's been dropped off. As I yelped on Facebook, this shit just got real.

Lost At Sea

"Duffy? Fucking Duffy?!"

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Earlier this week the Lass & I went to a preview screening of The Boat That Rocked, a film ostensibly about the UK pirate radio of the Sixties, complete with a solid cast and Richard Curtis writing & directing. I've always had a soft spot for Curtis, partly for the brilliant Blackadder, mainly for the wonderful adaptation of the Odyssey that he did with Tony Robinson for BBC Children (I've still got the two books they did and they remain a thrilling hoot to read). I wasn't expecting a classic film, but some easy-going fun with good laughs and a decent soundtrack seemed certain. Well, I was right about the music...

The Boat That Rocked starts off by setting the scene and immediately misfires. We're introduced to a fictional pirate radio station, Radio Rock, clearly based on Radio Caroline and the personalities on board. But there's no real effort to show how pirate radio came into being, where the DJs came from (which could've added some much-needed depth to the flat characters), how word about the station spread across the UK in those pre-net days, nothing like that. Nope, it's simply:

• Pirate radio plays rock & pop music!
• All women want to sleep with the DJs, except lesbians (and even they don't mind a grope)!
• The entire nation listens to this one station and keeps dancing, dancing, dancing, every hour of every day!
• Everyone, that is, except for the Government, with their suits and classical music, who just want to stop everyone having fun, because apparently fun is dangerous and anti-establishment! Booooooo!

And that's pretty much it. It's so insultingly simplistic, I kept waiting for things to take a turn, an "ah-ha!" to give it all some depth, relevance, a reflection of reality. Never happens - as social history goes, Austin Powers was more realistic and nuanced than this nonsense, while the depiction of women is on a par with the Sun and Loaded - they're there to worship the men, get their tits out and dance giddily, nothing more, and the film is perfectly happy with that.  Fucks sake, the Carry On films were progressive compared to this.  No wonder the only good quotes on the posters came from red-top tabloids.

So, it's not trying to show how things really were, more some clichéd, idealised rose-and-dope-tinted version of the Sixties. Is that so bad? Well, it is if the start and end of the film purport to place the story in the context of our social history, especially when the real story of Radio Caroline is far more interesting & relevant than what's shown here.

But no, instead you get some remarkably flat characters which really don't deserve the actors they get - Philip Seymour Hoffman is excellent, doing the best he can with a shitty script, and Bill Nighy is clearly having a ball. Indeed, it looks like the sort of film where people had a great time making it, only that doesn't carry through to the finished product. What little comedy there is barely survives the first hour, after which even a genuine humoured smile is hard to come by. There's dialogue in this film that you'd take to be a weak parody of Curtis' earlier work, if it hadn't been written by the man himself. See the dreadful Hugh-Grantesque gosh-I'm-so-terribly-awkward-but-you're-awfully-lovely speech that the frankly useless central character gives, or the bogglingly dumb move of giving not one but two of the establishment figures a 'naughty' name (Twatt and Clitt, for what it's worth. Seriously.) that barely raises a smile the first time and just grates after the second. The storytelling is feeble, the first half basically consisting of a bunch of scenes that never seem to connect to each other, while the second half is sodding woeful. I could've just about forgiven the flaws of the first hour, but the second is truly awful (and way too long to boot - this film is over two hours long and feels it) as the boat springs a leak and it turns into fucking Titanic of all things. And where earlier Curtis-scripted films would bring things together nicely, if cheesily, at the end, TBTR fails utterly. It tries to generate a drama, a heartlift that it hasn't lifted a finger to earn, instead generating nothing but rolling eyes and utter exasperation, tempered only with relief that finally, thankfully it's all over.

Honestly, there's hardly anything good to be said about the whole 2 hours 10 minutes. The soundtrack is certainly good, but with zero surprises you could hear the contents on Radio 2 or any mainstream classic gold station. Hell, chances are you've got most of the songs already, so save your time, save your money, stay at home and put some of those classic songs on yourself. You'll get so much more out of them pure than filtered and bellowed over by the film. And for a real taste of the difference pop music made to so many lives, read something like The Peel Sessions. Evocative, thrilling, it goes some way to capturing the sense of history, excitement and change that this music represented, something TBTR purports to do, yet fails in the weakest, dullest, squarest way.

And the above outburst? At the very end, following a knuckle-gnawingly embarrassing chorus of the cast yelling "rock and roll!!!" (you'll pray for punks, mods & rockers to turn up on gunboats and blow everyone out of the water) there's some godawful text attempting to place the film in the context of modern musical history, basically saying "thanks to all that, there's hundreds of radio stations today playing rock & pop" (with sod all mention of how the real pirate DJs led the charge on Radio 1, presumably as that'd sound too establishmenty) followed by a montage of album covers which are supposed to symbolise the very best of the last 40+ years of music but basically looks like an old iPod commercial showing off Curtis' CD collection. The very fact that the bland warblings of Duffy are one such highlight should tell you everything about the mentality of this film that makes rock'n'roll look as flacid, inoffensive and irrelevant as the establishment it seeks to mock. Rarely has there been a film so thoroughly slappable. This ain't rock'n'roll... this is shit.