<p>A Mystery: Why Can't We Walk Straight? from NPR on Vimeo.</p>
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Tuesday, 18 January 2011
Doc about sneaking around NYC subway tunnels
<p>UNDERCITY from Andrew Wonder on Vimeo.</p>
Whether you agree with the methods, this is a super tense documentary. Looks beautiful too.
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Monday, 17 January 2011
I used to live here...
I found a couple of albums back home. Unfortunately, the photos were fused to the cellophane, so I had to shoot through them - hence the reflections. I think these were all taken in Sharjah in 1978. I would have been about 18 months.
Posted via email from antigob
Wednesday, 12 January 2011
Writing soundtrack 10 – 14 Jan
Macaroni cheese300g of macaroni
100g of lentils (puy – teat yourself)
75g of bog standard Cheddar cheese
25g Manchego
25g Grana Padano
1 clove of garlic, crushed if you’ve got a hot date, otherwise 2
A ball of butter
Spoon or so of flour
A bunch of milk
A good surface area of breadcrumbs
Enough sliced tomato to make a smiley face or your favourite band's logo
A bay leaf
A buttered oven dish
Salt n PepaFirst set up your stereo/iPhone dock etc and turn the oven on. Make sure nothing’s in there and it’s clean. Remember, dirty oven, dirty bits. Set the temperature for around 180 degrees, but don’t get too wound up about it, the oven’s job here is to crisp everything up, finish the pasta and infuse flavour. Making macaroni and cheese is mostly about getting everything ready for one intense moment (Italians call this bit ‘l'evento’ – The Event). You need a big pan and a lot of boiling water for the pasta, so boil a full kettle and once you got it on the stove add salt and splash of oil so nothing sticks.Now macaroni, do you have to use macaroni? Each pasta sauce has a specific pasta to go with it. The shape, weight and the inclusion of areas for sauce to collect (think shells) compliment the individual qualities of their respective sauce. The Guardian did an article on this subject. Remember don’t read the comments or you’ll lose your mind. But the short answer with macaroni cheese is yes, you need to use pasta that’s small and will soak up the sauce; and for it to do that you need to par-cook the macaroni. So if it says 10 minutes on the packet, cook for five. Next, wash and then simmer the lentils for whatever it says on the packet. Get a bowl ready to put the cooked lentils in. And get some bowls out to put all the other ingredients in (except the garlic, which you should pre-load into your crusher), because you must prepare for ‘l'evento’.While the pasta and lentils are cooking, grate the cheese into a bowl. If you want to use different cheeses in different amounts you can. This is my favourite combination. I must add that like the hamburger, it pays to keep it simple and not gourmet it up too much. This is a simple dish, the kind author Stephen King might eat. I know Manchego is a bit ‘Taste the Difference’, but it’s my favourite cheese. Anyway the whole lifestyle pornography of food and food culture is a different kettle of fish and now – mid-recipe – is not the time to discuss it. At this point your macaroni should be par cooked, drain and return to the big saucepan and take a deep breath. Look at your kitchen counter. You should see a bowl of cheese, bowl of lentils, your ball of butter, your flour with a spoon sticking in it, your garlic in the crusher and your milk – opened and ready by the stove. Grab a small saucepan and a wooden spoon; it’s time for ‘l'evento’. It’s time to make a Roux.Melt the butter in the pan, fry the garlic and add flour a little bit at a time and stir. You want to make a paste – not too thin, but it shouldn’t ball up either. You might have to start again, but don’t worry you’re not a failure, just a regular guy. So you got your paste and this is when you realise why everything has to be in bowls. You need everything to hand because you have to keep stirring. Stop and you’ve got lumps. Now work that arm as you add the milk. You want a sauce: so not too thin, but remember when you add cheese that will thicken it up too, so the whole thing is adding a dash of milk and a bit of cheese, and stirring. You want enough sauce to make a big sloppy mass when you add it to the macaroni – so make enough to fill two thirds of your saucepan. Don’t stop stirring; add salt and pepper, add the lentils. Now give it one last stir and dump that sucka all over your macaroni in the big pan. Then stir that. Mmm. Don’t eat it just yet.Slop it into the dish you buttered earlier. Why buttered? Well like life, if you don’t butter your dish it’s going to get caked in a layer of cheese no wire brush will shift.Finally sprinkle the breadcrumbs on the top for a bit crisp. Arrange your tomatoes into a smiley face/Batman logo/whatever and dust with even more grated cheese.Then it’s in the fuggin’ oven for fifteen or so minutes. While you wait, relax with a nice whisky sour. When it’s done, you’ll find your mac n cheese won’t be that runny because the pasta has absorbed the sauce. This is good and makes for an intensely cheesy taste. Serve with watercress or a salad and prepare for a bunch of wild dreams later.
Soft, soft, soft comfort food100g of lentils (puy – teat yourself)
75g of bog standard Cheddar cheese
25g Manchego
25g Grana Padano
1 clove of garlic, crushed if you’ve got a hot date, otherwise 2
A ball of butter
Spoon or so of flour
A bunch of milk
A good surface area of breadcrumbs
Enough sliced tomato to make a smiley face or your favourite band's logo
A bay leaf
A buttered oven dish
Salt n PepaFirst set up your stereo/iPhone dock etc and turn the oven on. Make sure nothing’s in there and it’s clean. Remember, dirty oven, dirty bits. Set the temperature for around 180 degrees, but don’t get too wound up about it, the oven’s job here is to crisp everything up, finish the pasta and infuse flavour. Making macaroni and cheese is mostly about getting everything ready for one intense moment (Italians call this bit ‘l'evento’ – The Event). You need a big pan and a lot of boiling water for the pasta, so boil a full kettle and once you got it on the stove add salt and splash of oil so nothing sticks.Now macaroni, do you have to use macaroni? Each pasta sauce has a specific pasta to go with it. The shape, weight and the inclusion of areas for sauce to collect (think shells) compliment the individual qualities of their respective sauce. The Guardian did an article on this subject. Remember don’t read the comments or you’ll lose your mind. But the short answer with macaroni cheese is yes, you need to use pasta that’s small and will soak up the sauce; and for it to do that you need to par-cook the macaroni. So if it says 10 minutes on the packet, cook for five. Next, wash and then simmer the lentils for whatever it says on the packet. Get a bowl ready to put the cooked lentils in. And get some bowls out to put all the other ingredients in (except the garlic, which you should pre-load into your crusher), because you must prepare for ‘l'evento’.While the pasta and lentils are cooking, grate the cheese into a bowl. If you want to use different cheeses in different amounts you can. This is my favourite combination. I must add that like the hamburger, it pays to keep it simple and not gourmet it up too much. This is a simple dish, the kind author Stephen King might eat. I know Manchego is a bit ‘Taste the Difference’, but it’s my favourite cheese. Anyway the whole lifestyle pornography of food and food culture is a different kettle of fish and now – mid-recipe – is not the time to discuss it. At this point your macaroni should be par cooked, drain and return to the big saucepan and take a deep breath. Look at your kitchen counter. You should see a bowl of cheese, bowl of lentils, your ball of butter, your flour with a spoon sticking in it, your garlic in the crusher and your milk – opened and ready by the stove. Grab a small saucepan and a wooden spoon; it’s time for ‘l'evento’. It’s time to make a Roux.Melt the butter in the pan, fry the garlic and add flour a little bit at a time and stir. You want to make a paste – not too thin, but it shouldn’t ball up either. You might have to start again, but don’t worry you’re not a failure, just a regular guy. So you got your paste and this is when you realise why everything has to be in bowls. You need everything to hand because you have to keep stirring. Stop and you’ve got lumps. Now work that arm as you add the milk. You want a sauce: so not too thin, but remember when you add cheese that will thicken it up too, so the whole thing is adding a dash of milk and a bit of cheese, and stirring. You want enough sauce to make a big sloppy mass when you add it to the macaroni – so make enough to fill two thirds of your saucepan. Don’t stop stirring; add salt and pepper, add the lentils. Now give it one last stir and dump that sucka all over your macaroni in the big pan. Then stir that. Mmm. Don’t eat it just yet.Slop it into the dish you buttered earlier. Why buttered? Well like life, if you don’t butter your dish it’s going to get caked in a layer of cheese no wire brush will shift.Finally sprinkle the breadcrumbs on the top for a bit crisp. Arrange your tomatoes into a smiley face/Batman logo/whatever and dust with even more grated cheese.Then it’s in the fuggin’ oven for fifteen or so minutes. While you wait, relax with a nice whisky sour. When it’s done, you’ll find your mac n cheese won’t be that runny because the pasta has absorbed the sauce. This is good and makes for an intensely cheesy taste. Serve with watercress or a salad and prepare for a bunch of wild dreams later.
Posted via email from antigob
Pink Ponies: a case study
This has been doing the rounds in ad circles, mainly because this sort of case study is all too close to the truth.
Posted via email from antigob
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
Back now
I’ve been on my holidays, so it’s been a bit quiet round here. But while I was away I read these beauties:
Fup by Jim DodgeI rate Stone Junction even when it wobbles a bit towards the end. But this is a perfect little novella; an understated fairy tale of a duck that changes the lives of two men. It’s so carefully written it could be set during any time, except the bit when they got to the drive-in. It’s only 117, very narrow set pages. I read it in a couple of hours, and then I went straight on to:Theft by Peter Carey
I completely loved His Illegal Self and this was another perfectly tuned tale. Meet the Butcher brothers; Michael, a disgraced painter on his heels and his "damaged two hundred and twenty pound brother", Hugh. Together they get involved with a tale of love and art theft that takes them from the Outback to Tokyo and New York. I’ve nearly finished his first novel Bliss, which is a completely different tone and has that rare quality of making laugh out loud. Oh and his writing makes me jealous.I can never sleep on planes and seeing as I had two nine and a half hour flights I had plenty of time to watch these. I started Animal Kingdom, a tense, claustrophobic film about a family of bank robbers being hunted by corrupt police; it’ll probably get remade by Hollywood, but check out the original, the acting is superb:Then I had a bit of double bill of one of my favourite directors, David Fincher. So I started with Se7en. How on earth this got made with the ending I have no idea. Check out the trailer with the ‘there was a time…’ narrator:Then it was time for The Game. This is a bit of an oddity – almost seventies like in its paranoia. I wonder how it did on release? I’m guessing not that well, which is a shame because it’s a crafted film. The lighting, cinematography have that understated Fincher polish and even when it starts to get silly, Michael Douglas gives a great performance as the remote and lonely businessman in the big house on the hill. Plus Sean Penn shouting always makes me laugh:
So, I thought I’d follow it up with Wall Street Money Never Sleeps. Don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s Wall Street 2 now, because it isn’t. Oliver Stone’s new film is squarely on the side of the bankers. They are a noble profession, keeping the wheels of capitalism turning. Or are they? Because here comes Gordon Gekko with his book about how we’re all going to hell in a handcart. Are we? I don’t know, I found the whole film a dreary mess. At some point I was being asked to solicit sympathy for a self-serving financial industry – yeah right. And Shia Le Beouf as an energy investor who only invests in nice companies doing nice things was completely unbelievable. They might as well have had him running around in a Gundam suit. At least he could smash up a few buildings. Yeah I know that sounds like Transformers, but all he ever does is shout his lines. He needs something smashed up in the background for his style of acting to make any sense. Josh Brolin’s in it too. I expect they offered him a pallet of cash. Oh here’s the trailer:Poor old Carey Mulligan who played Shia’s boyfriend also stars in the adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, Never Let Me Go. It’s a great book, perhaps not as good as The Remains of the Day, but weaved from a cloth of closely examined detail. Unfortunately, the film throws all this out to get mired in a bizarre post-war styling of a Britain that clearly never existed. Now I know this is in the book, and although I was never convinced it worked, it was in the background enough for it not to affect the story. Unfortunately this aesthetic has been really taken to town in the film so the finished result looks like a gruesome retelling of The Island in the style of Atonement. And they reveal the purpose of the children in the first five minutes. And they cut the whole concept of Norfolk. Total miss. Read the book instead. Here’s the trailer anyway. Isn’t it British?And finally before sleep, I checked out Takers. Meet the ultimate crew of LA bank robbers. They’re tight, do a job a year and each one is well planned and executed. Hmm sounds like Heat. Yeah, but this one’s got Hayden Christensen in it, playing a character who looks as if he fell asleep in a playgroup and let the kids scrawl all over him. But at least he’s got a bit of work eh? This is a funny one. There are loads of things wrong with it: the first lines in the movie are ‘you look like shit’, the action scenes are lame, the characters are two dimensional (the Russians all have ropey tattoos), the whole thing seems to be art directed by CSI Miami production crew and the premise simply doesn’t add up. If these guys are so rich from their exploits, with plenty of shiny clothes, money in offshore accounts and a twatty club, why are they doing scores? Because they’re takers! Oh right. But there are some redeemable points. It’s got Idris Elba in it. He can act and I really liked the subplot with his character’s sister. Especially when it starts to draw Matt Dillon’s cop close to the group. Matt Dillon can act too, but it’s a shame his cop is a collection of clichés. Except they’ve been updated. Troubled cops don’t drink and smoke now, they chug spring water and chuck the bottle out of the car window. Don’t worry he still tells IA to get off his back man! There’s a good film in here, shame it was made by Michael Mann 15 years ago.
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