Picos Gemeos

Arab Jazz by Karim Miské

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Karim Miské's debut novel is timely and has all the ingredients for a great crime novel. It's set in contemporary Paris, involves radicalised muslim youth and acts of terror, and it touches on drug dealing, mental illness and police corruption. Sadly, this is a disappointing read.

The novel starts out well enough, with a depressed and isolated young man, Ahmed, discovering the murdered body of his upstairs neighbour, a young woman who had once been a Jehovah Witness. The crime scene is set up in order to implicate Ahmed but the two police officers assigned to the case immediately sense he's innocent. Soon, the police officers realise the crime points at local young men with extremist views.

This promising set up is unfortunately torn apart by a sudden influx of all sorts of characters living in the neighbourhood -- from the victim's girlfriends to a dodgy barber -- who take away the focus of the story and any suspense surrounding the investigation. The narrative, intriguing to start with, gets bloated by all these characters - most who are just there as misplaced red herrings.

Another problem with the novel is that Miské uses the third person omniscient point of view, giving us a look into the minds of all characters, including the murderer, and unfortunately diffuses all tension in the story. By the end, you couldn't care less who killed who, who survived, who went on a date with you. There are no surprises. You are left with the feeling that with a little more effort Miské could have turned this into a cracking read.

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I came home from work on Hallowe'en to groups of children with their parents, walking up and down our street dressed as creatures of the night, carrying orange buckets for their sweet goodies.

I saw a neighbour come out of the corner shop and at first I thought she had made herself up to look like a zombie. Upon closer inspection, I realised she was just tired.

My boyfriend and I spent the evening watching Byzantium, a pretty decent vampire film set in a nameless location in the British Isles. It had a new twist to the genre: a mother and daughter were on the run because vampires were a brotherhood that did not allow women.

(Nobody knocked on our door.)

The 16-year-old daughter had been moping like a teenager for 200 years. She dealt with her curse by feeding off elderly people who wanted to die. She played the piano beautifully, which made me think of the pianos in St Pancras, with their signs "Play Me." There's one just by the Eurostar's arrival door: visitors from France and beyond, quite often, are greeted by some random traveler playing it as they roll their suitcases into London. It's quite a nice idea and I salute whoever came up with it.

I wish I could play the piano. I wish I could play any musical instrument actually (apart from the triangle.) I'd drop by St Pancras once in a while on my lunch break, sit at the piano and whip up a sonata.

The Reality Overload: The Modern World's Assault on the Imaginal Realm by Annie Le Brun

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a very academic collection of essays that suffers slightly under the translation from French into English. Nevertheless, it's packed with ideas and polemics on how the dissemination of GMO foods in our world is not unrelated to the information explosion we are going through. In a nutshell, Annie Le Brun's theory is that an attack on our imagination (led by globalisation and French Theory, mostly) has left us incapable of standing up against corporate interests (such as the ones behind the replacement of our food supplies with GMOs.)

I could relate to Brun's views on art: she believes that the excess of information we are under has eroded our courage to stand up and say "this is shit". Our culture wants us to believe everything now has equal weight, everything is subjective. You just have to walk through any museum to see this in the way curators add equal weight to a Picasso and a Damien Hirst. She reserves her final essay for an attack on the French theoreticians from the postmodern school of thinking who opened this door and allowed this disaster to happen. (I imagine Annie Le Brun would get along swimmingly with Camille Paglia). Elsewhere in the book she critics the bodies of Olympic athletes and bodybuilders (non-erotic and only meant for "repetitions"), deforestation, the breakdown of language, and much more.

I couldn't possibly do justice to her book and all the ideas in it. Suffice to say that it's an urgent call to arms for what remains of our world, for us to stand up against changes that are being imposed on us without our consent. If only we could find the strength to disconnect from the reality overload...

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May this song embody July for you:

I take the number 8 bus home. Yesterday, the bus was unusually packed and I had to squeeze into a corner seat on the ground floor - the kind where you have two people facing you. A pair of women with a suitcase and a copy of the Metro between them sat across from me. I pulled out my current reading choice and was about to start a chapter when one of them spoke in french to the other. Something about her was familiar. I looked up and realised that she was one of sushidog's oldest friends, introduced to Wink and I some time ago during one of Sushidog's visits to London. She's the one half of a lesbian couple who have known Sushidog and her parents for ages, now living in Hackney - really funny, warm people.

The non-Londoner must have been a french friend just arrived in town. They chatted about what to cook for dinner and called someone to confer about courgettes and Tesco. (I imagine it was the other half.) They got off at Liverpool St station. I should have said hello, shouldn't I?

This morning, a prospective candidate from the French Guiana came into our agency for an interview. We got chatting in french and it turns out her mother is brasilian (from Fortaleza). She was lovely. It was the first time I spoke to a native french speaker where I didn't feel a sense of inadequacy. I hope they find her a good job.

Il y a deux semaines, je suis allé à Plymouth. J'ai visité une amie qui étude la psychologie à l'université. Quand je suis arrivé, elle m'a rencontré à la gare. Pendant les jours suivants, elle m'a revelé Plymouth. J'avais de la chance parce qu'il ne pleuvait pas. Elle faisait le petit déjeuner tous les jours et les waffles étaient sa specialité.  Les nuits, nous regardions la télé ou parlions de notre vies. Nous avons visité aussi un bar où on pouvait acheter des cocktails. Parce que je n'ai pas eu aucun roman a bouquiner, elle m'a prêté un trés bon livre qui raconte l'aventure des vampires qui voyageait sur le Mississippi aux 19e siècle.


Merci rosamicula pour les corrections!

I just got back from the Institut Français, where I was tested and interviewed; they placed me in the intermediaire intensive course that starts in two weeks. That's three hours a day for two weeks, which I'm planning on treating like a full immersion by only reading stuff in french, watching french films, etc, during that period. The Institut is just by South Kensington Tube station and I'd say about half the people that walked past me - even in the Tube ride there - were French. Sacré coeur! I'll get my rusty French off the ground in no time.

I also had an interview today with that temp agency I've been working with off-and-on for the past nine years. It's looking very good.

Tonight, we are watching some Wire with our dinner. Tomorrow, I'm volunteering at a LGBT organisation south of the river who need my help promoting a fund raising event in February. On Thursday we pack our bags, take a train to Plymouth and move in with sushidog for good!!

Two decisions for 2010:

1) To become vegetarian. Not right now though - I've got fish in the house and I might as well eat it rather than throw it away. I was a vegetarian before - for a year and a half (ten years ago) - but I didn't do it right (too much cheese). I think I'm ready now. Down goes my carbon footprint. Up goes my experiments with different dishes and spices. I think it would be a great learning tool, and a distraction from impending unemployment.

2) Enroll in the Institute Français and take an intensive course in February, followed by more dispersed classes throughout the year. And start giving Brasilian Portuguese lessons to wink_martindale, blu_bear and desayuno_ingles (or anyone else, really, who's interested.) Good teaching practice for me; good language to learn for you.

Enya, please sing to me throughout the night and don't let the Big Bad Insomnia catch me.

Despite attending a "lame" fetish night at Slimelight on Friday, then not getting any sleep, tina found enough strength yesterday to get on a train from Walthamstow and come meet the actor who plays Kevin and I at Liverpool Street Station. Every Londoner was out and about after a smiley sun rose above the capital. She looked gorgeous as ever, although a little sleepy; we walked over to Brick Lane for the South African B-B-Q I'd promised earlier in the week, as well as a long-overdue catch up.

Afterwards, we grabbed some coffee and had a look at the stalls that sell overpriced crap by clueless Shoreditch designers. There seemed to be a vintage store every ten feet, which brought the shopper out of Tina and Kevin: soon he had a grey bag for his notebooks and pens, and she had a vest and a beautiful dark blue dress.



We visited Nog Gallery so Tina could check out their zines and art books; we ended up discovering a neat exhibition of darkly humourous etchings made by a Hackney artist called John M F Casey. They are quite beautiful - I believe he painted the wooden canvasses white, then black, then etched through them to create imagery of hellish horrors that would suit Tim Burton's living room.



We said our goodbyes to Tina around 4.30pm and went to Spitalfields Market to wait for tom. His girlfriend christa had planned for him a massive treasure hunt across London, and we were his almost-at-the-end-of-the-line stop. I had a pirate badge pinned to my bag which said "Happy Birthday to Me"; as soon as he found us, I removed it and he pinned it on his jacket. His task was to sing any of The Smiths' songs in their entirety, with no mistakes, so he could learn his next destination. He shocked me to the Moon and back by not knowing in full any of their lyrics. He stammered through "This Charming Man", failed at "Bigmouth Strikes Again", and was about to bomb on "Shoplifters of the World Unite" when Kevin told me to give him a break and suggest an easy one. So I suggested "How Soon Is Now?", which he murdered hurried through before making his escape. Remind me to never go karaoking with him.

We headed for Waterloo for a meeting with my old friend Kelly at the BFI Southbank. Juliette Binoche's paintings are being exhibited there as part of their "Binoche Season" and they are worth checking out if you are in the area. Her paintings are pairs that match her career's characters with the directors she has worked with. All of her self-portraits are infused with the personalities and physionomies of the directors that created them.

Kelly showed up with a gift for us, some french cheese, figs and lavender she collected from her house in France. We walked over to Soho's Curzon because the idea of watching a grim Icelandic thriller called Jar City on a beautiful September night seemed like a good idea. It was one of those films which could have easily been made for TV - a sort of Prime Suspect with detectives that eat goat heads for dinner and juggle their personal lives with their depressing work. The film had some wonderful aerial shots of Iceland but its main message seemed to be: DON'T LIVE IN THIS FUCKING MISERABLE ISLAND. Iceland's Ministry of Tourism should look into suing.



Outside the cinema, past 11pm, London suddenly seemed overwhelmed by crowds of horny, drunken louts from the 'burbs. Everyone shouted over everyone else, and cars honked uselessly at a traffic that was going nowhere. A gang of women dressed as FBI agents, the leader wearing bridal headgear, stumbled past us. Even the neon lights seemed brighter than usual, intense enough to burn your retinas. A nightmarish sight rolled into view: a red double-decker bus crammed with people, blasting "YMCA". The bus carried girls wearing glittery tiaras who were having a right hoot rubbing their boobs against the windowpanes for the benefit of the men on the sidewalk, their hands banging in the air as if the Village People were the ultimate rave experience. Some girls on the street felt compelled to join the fun by rushing to the windows and doing their own YMCA moves back at the partygoers inside. It only dawned on me to take a photo of this modern horseman of the apocalypse once it was pulling away - thus the shaky photo above.



Today, we took our iPods and newspapers to Vicky Park, bought some bagels and coffee and lay on the grass in full view of the sun. On the way back, we found this chest of drawers sitting on the sidewalk, not too far from our tower block. There was nothing wrong with it apart from its green snot colour (debatable defect) and food stains (solved quickly with a soapy cloth). It's going to sit in the master bedroom after it failed to look alright in the hallway, the sitting room and the dining room.



This little fellow approached us last week, when we were sitting on the lawn outside the Geffrye Museum enjoying coffee and slices of cakes bought at Broadway Market. dawnkitten made the mistake of giving it some of her carrot cake, instantly creating a friend who thought she was made of cake. I never saw a squirrel this upclose before; he was actually slightly intimidating. It didn't even flinch away from Kevin's paparazzi-style photography. Just look at that mouth. It wants to eat you. Yes, YOU!