six dinner sid

As a child i adored the fantastic 'Six Dinner Sid', the story of a cat who dedicates his days to the pursuit of more interesting food. Admiring this hunt for better; here's a bit of art, culture and of course some damn good grub.

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‘Rinzen’ Antoni Tapies, Macba, 26/03/2015

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I've been playing making gifs.. this is just a glimpse of Helen Mirren doing the XBX workout in some of her more famous roles.. Hitchcock

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Calendar Girls

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and of course The Queen

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Get Fit With Helen Mirren and the Royal Canadian Air Force!

After twenty years of teasing my dad for flapping about on the living room floor before work every morning, my brother and I have both succumbed to his 5BX workout. Created in the 1950’s for the Royal Canadian Airforce, 5BX  was designed in order to keep the soldiers in shape without the need of gym equipment or a lot of space. All the exercises can be performed in a 6ft x 6ft area and the whole routine only takes 12 minutes.

Having calculated your target level, based on age, users follow a series of charts listing the number of repetitions for each exercise. 5BX (10BX for women) works by increasing the number of repetitions and difficulty of exercises whilst keeping the 12 minute time limit constant. The progression through the charts is gradual, there is a recommended number of days before you can move on to the next level and if you are ill or miss a day you have to go back two or three levels, in this way your body grows in strength and resistance avoiding injury.

Although the exercises may appear simple, when given the challenge of completing them all in the time limit you soon feel the exertion. In just 12 minutes I had broken a sweat and was out of breath – and herein lies the genius of 5BX. Running buggers up your knees, swimming requires a pool, cycling a bicycle and the gym is the electromagnetic field of all evil to which attracts crazed testosterone filled muscle warriors intent on manipulating their bodies into unnatural shapes.

Not healthy at all.

But if you’re like me, too poor for yoga, too much pride for zumba and always going to choose the extra hour in bed over a wintry morning run then the 5BX (XBX for women) could be for you! Not convinced? In response to queries into how she had attained her great body at age 69 (of course the second question to any actress following ‘Who are you wearing?’ is always ‘What didn’t you eat?’) Helen Mirren stated she had been following the XBX,

"It is the exercise I have done off and on my whole life. It just very gently gets you fit.’’

Not wanting to seem a hypocrite, I have a lot or respect for Helen Mirren, her portrayal of both queen Liz’s have been incredible, she’s smart, she picks and researchers her roles, speaks French… but also… Have you seen Calendar Girls?

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Information Load

‘’In 2002 the amount of information stored digitally finally surpassed the entire world’s analogical data.

By 2007, some 94% of all the information on the planet was digitally coded information. ‘’ 

And so sets the pre-set for Big Bang Data, the current exhibition at the CCCB. In principle an exhibition about information doesn’t tantalise the mind’s eye in in the same way that a spliced carcass of a cow might but the CCCB have consistently pulled through and furthermore I was intrigued at how they were going to tackle a theme so vast.

On entering the space you are presented with seven transparent globes hanging in a line at waist height , these floating display cabinets are a physical infographic showing the evolution of the hole-punched card used to clock in to work in the 50’s,(which stored approximately 0.85kb of information) to the floppy disk  (1.4gb..and who else had completely erased them from memory?)to the big daddy terra bite(1000gb).

Needless to say, in fifty years we’ve come a long way.

I’m not going to make lengthy descriptions of the different parts of the exhibition. The act would completely contradict the very sentiment that the curators were clearly aiming to communicate. However I would like to commend the installation ‘24 Hours in Photos’ which was particularly jarring. Doing what it says on the tin; artist Eric Kessels collected and printed all the photos uploaded to Flikr during a period of 24 hours and placed them in one room. Seeing this digital data physically displayed is astonishing. The amount of repetitive imagery is overwhelming and I couldn’t help but notice the irony of the people walking around the space taking photos…

Instead of carving our names in the trees or lugging boulders across miles of countryside (yeah not so sure that Stonehenge was worth the trouble) we express our presence by taking selfies, writing status updates, filming vibes -  all of which can be shared instantaneously. We are now inundated with information but is it useful?

Factoids, factlets, and facts

‘Factloid- spurious information that is repeated so much it becomes true’

‘Factlet’ – a brief interesting fact

‘Fact’ – The truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth

So here I present you with a common FACTOID: ‘The Great Wall of China is the only made man object able to be seen from space’

But who really feels indignation with the discovery that FACTLET: ‘The Great Wall of China is not the only man-made object able to be seen from Space?’

The problem doesn’t lie in the truth of a piece of information but whether or not it is stimulating! And with the upsurge of the smartphone now the whole world has the truth according to Google in their pocket. For better or for worse (and I mean to say here whilst OF COURSE I am a sucker for the beauty of physical printed books and vinyl I’m in no way suggesting that you throw your iPhone’s out the window)this has undeniably changed the way we look for and process information.

Now the skill is being able to decipher between which information is thought provoking and which is just taking up space in your hard drive.

i

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A friend’s response when he found out I was going to Verona had been cynical, ‘the town of Romeo and Juliet?’ as if to suggest that the only possible reason two single friends would go away together must be some sort of love quest. In fact I’d had no idea that Verona was ‘The City of Love’ (what about Paris?) until after we had booked the flights. Verona was cheaper than Florence but had the same expectations of beautiful Romanesque architecture and September sunshine   - and it was near Lake Garda (where George Clooney does not have a house, unfortunately, that’s Lake Como).

The friend with who I was travelling, a recently English literature graduate had been aware of Shakespeare’s employment of the setting and so found it mildly amusing to proclaim Shakespearean quotes whilst passing the numerous lovely medieval balconies that sort of looked like they could have been the scene of the crime if it weren’t for the purple plastic cat bowl and matching litter tray probably would have been a bit if a buzz kill for our fair young lovers.

Anyways so we walked and we cycled and we sunbathed and we swam and we ate and we drunk a lot – and one day we even got up early and went for a run and sweated loads because that’s what happens when you go running in the Mediterranean when the sun is up  - but ultimately, we had an awesome and much needed vacation. (I am not American but I hate the word ‘holiday’ originating from ‘holy’ – ‘day’ because, quite frankly, I have never used this period to reflect upon God or any other being, but entirely selfishly spend the time day dreaming about how, when I return to ‘the real world’ I will better myself; take more exercise, drink less, read a broadsheet daily, be nicer to the dog – new year’s resolution type crap – which I then use to justify my subsequent activities wherever I am that these rules do not apply).

It was only on the last day that the issue of ‘love’ be raised. I know I am a victim of the rom com; watched far too many back in the 90’s alongside a hefty dose of Friends and now How I Met Your Mother and my view of the world is – in the harsh but honest words of my father – ‘away with the fairies’. I think about love as if it is this tangible thing to be obtained and held on to. I know this is wrong and that ‘love’ is just a word meaning utterly different things to different people and so I try not to let my actions be dictated by my irrational emotions, however, I have resigned myself to the fact that I am a romantic person and believe in happy endings and that to some this equates to ‘I am a crazy person’.

We came across the Casa di Giulietta, not hard to miss, considering there was about three hundred other tourists spilling out of what was a fairly small courtyard , and went to investigate what all the fuss was about. Refusing to pay the six euro so that we could run upstairs and actually stand on the actual balcony of the actual Juliet (she’s a fictitious character here people), incontestably we stayed below. Basically there’s a house with a balcony and two shops: one that sells postcards, mugs, fridge-magnet type things and the other that makes to order hand embroidered tea-towels with you and the name of your beau stitched in red thread and then there’s the statue of Juliet. At first glance this seemed pretty ordinary until my friend pointed out that the snaking queues of people were waiting for the opportunity to rub her left boob.

Admittedly I thought this was hilarious and started to take photos of the many shamefaced tourists who went up for a stroke (and in some cases a firm squeeze). I was then informed that the reason they were taking part in this bizarre ritual was because to touch the breast of Juliet is supposed to bring you luck in love – and then suddenly the whole place became overwhelmingly ridiculous. On the wall behind Juliet were thousands of proclamations of love scribbled on pieces of used chewing gum, a grate with pink locks (that incidentally you could purchase in the gift shop for just eight euros) signifying everlasting love and pieces of paper, letters to Juliet, begging for her help everywhere. This site had become some sort of pilgrimage for lonely hearts or those couples wishing to bless their relationships under the good fortune of Romeo and Juliet? Had they even read the play? – Or at the very least seen the Baz Lurhmann version?!

On the scale of craziness, I’ve just been surpassed. 

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These was in the KKKB showroom in Barcelona, the captions were either in castillian or turkish so for the first time I couldn't read 'what it was about'. It's become rare that a gallery devotes an entire exhibition to drawing which is a shame because as Tan Cemal Genc displays, there's a lot that can be said with a continuous single black line.

Although they include cartoons for the Turkish newspaper Radikal, they are perfect wordless, and a ability (or indeed, a lack of) to read the text didn't prevent from following his stream of consciousness. Looking at a person's drawings is like looking at pieces of thought; you notice the recurring elements, the things they are a bit shaky about, the things that they confidently believe in, it's a gift to see it.

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The Invisible Bicycle Helmet. These two girls have shown that if one of your projects isn't working, you aren't working hard enough. What started as a university project looking into better bicycle safety became something incredible that yeah, took years and copious amounts of tears, trials and money. But who here would say is wasn't worth it?

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Skiing is one of those things where our selective memory nerve goes into overdrive.

For me, it’s a cold white combat against a soulless monster who wants to drain the blood from my extremities.

Mountain’s first move: ‘The psyche out’; before you even get to the start point, there’s a rickety ski lift to tackle that after whacking you in the back of the knees, takes you on a vertigo inspiring tour.

Your move: Try to dismount said lift without falling over..

Mountain’s second move: ‘The taunt’; more cruel psychological games as he shows you four year old professionals sliding effortlessly down the mountain right out of ski school.

Counter attack: Race to the edge, the only way of realistically getting through this is by not allowing yourself to feel the fear, and adopt a position of confidence.

Mountain: Wind. Visibility is now poor to nil as the ground powder whips up in your face revealing hidden ice patches, oh and you can’t feel your fingers anymore, that’s going to make it a whole lot harder to clench onto your poles..

Your move:  Now you can’t see further than 30 cm in front of you the dizziness has gone, you may as well start your descent.

Mountain: ‘The smack’… across the forehead/ back/ bum as your faceplant impacts with hard snow/a piste marker/a tree/ a snowboarder/ your own skis/ to cause perhaps an unsurprising amount of pain

By this time, your best move is ‘get up, roll home, apply ointment to bruises’.

An unbalanced contest if ever there was one.

Yet for some reason, six hours and seven hot chocolates later you are sitting in the safety of your cosy chalet, sweating profusely in full thermals as you couldn’t quite muster up the energy to peel them off your exhausted limbs and staring out the window thinking how pretty the mountain looks all dusted in icing sugar.

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When you feel physically sick with jealousy that you didn't come up with it first, then you know it's a winner. 'Seed Money': illustrated paper coins embedded with plant seeds. Originating from the US, each coin is a different category, so pennies are wildflowers, nickles are herbs, dimes are root crops and quarters salad plants. Ultimate guerilla gardening!

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The most powerful thing about a shadow is its allusion to something physical. Even though we all know how silhouettes are formed, there is something quite magical in the way Kumi Yamashita has brought life to these objects.

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I’m kind of really impressed with myself having managed to squeeze in four exhibitions, one ballet and one musical during the Christmas break – check me out Miss Cultured. (Okay I’ll get on to Melvyn’s Bragg value of culture, an excellent radio series if you have the chance, at a later date but for now let’s assume I was trying to expand my mind for me…)

I appreciated all of these experiences to varying degrees, but none did I feel was a waste of time and they all gave me something fresh to think about for their duration. The best ones, shout out to Elizabeth Price at the Turner Prize, are still being processed in my mind.

Price’s entry plays on our preconceptions of different film styles to make something strangely hypnotic and completely unclassifiable. Beginning with a fairly stale explanation of interior church architecture, the film unexpectedly switches pace and you are transported to some club, absorbed in the backing visuals when, just as you accustomise to this new and lively pulse, the atmosphere changes once again and everything becomes a bit sinister as the next part is real. The facts are drummed into you as witnesses accounts, timed to the throbbing beat, are repeated over and over again.

Leaving the screening was not dissimilar from waking up from a particularly engrossing dream. However, as you attempt to partition your thoughts you realise that you have simply stumbled upon someone else’s dream and cannot possibly share a matching prerequisite of ideas.

Your mind struggles to create some accepted order of events so as to decode this visual phenomenon. And all the while you are aware that someone made and edited this film so there must be a rationale. Damn I want to know what’s going on in her head.

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I didn’t feel like going out. I definitely didn’t feel like staying in and working either and I knew that if I didn’t stay in and work I’d only stay in and eat. So I decided I may as well go out and eat, it’s not classed as binging if there’s more than one person present.

Fifty minutes of sweaty Underground later I arrived at the RA, met my friend outside the rear entrance, I haven’t seen her in – shock horror – two whole months and then we start to talk.

Now as you may have noticed I am never short of things to say but even I can find this particular friend exhausting. I love her to pieces but at times the sonic pitch shrillness of her excitement has been known to send even the most well-trained of dogs absolutely ballistic.

More frustratingly, her perpetual joy is infectious. One finds oneself in a hyperactive state of enthusiasm, life is exaggerated; this falafel: the Best I have ever tasted; this ale: the creamiest; those candlesticks, the most delicately crafted in the world.

Do not get me wrong I’m all for optimism, I think that more often than not, you have the power to bring yourself out of a bad mood (I wanted to see this friend because I knew she would make me feel happy), the problem is that when it stops and you go back to the norm, when the film isn’t the visual orgasm, ‘I never need open my eyes again because I have seen true beauty, thank you god!’ – When something is just ‘good’, then suddenly we feel deflated.

Speaking in superlatives can give you a worse come-down than a dab of MD because you’re unable to find solace in the fact that this anti-climax is drug induced, you just feel a bit sad.

So here’s to Mariko Mori’s ‘Rebirth’ installation at the Royal Academy, described by the Times as ‘Mesmerising’ and the Guardian ‘Extraordinary’ – it was alright, a decent way to start an evening and quite therapeutic. Nothing more, nothing less.

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Today I spent over two hours hemming a skirt. I pinned it, tacked it, and tried it on twice, then once over on the sewing machine before tying off at the ends – a phenomenal waste of time some might argue considering this is a task that should have taken no more than twenty minutes.

It’s not that I’m short of things to do: I have four deadlines next week, an exam in a language I’m not quite proficient in, friends to catch up with before we all head back to our uni’s and I supposed to be flat hunting but for some reason I made the purchase knowing full well the skirt was too long.

It got me thinking about an exhibition I went to in 2011 at the Women’s Library in Whitechapel, based upon the women’s need to craft. At the time I remember feeling quite sceptical, I was doing a research project on the women’s domestic role and coming across far too many pink and floral home appliances not to write off the women’s position in the home as complete coercion by the male led advertising firms of the 1950’s. However, I think I may now have to revaluate. My mum has always been very dexterous: making and hanging all the curtains in our house, upholstering old furniture, forever altering and mending our clothes and my grandmother used to make her own clothes so is also very talented with a needle and thread (although she refuses to knit because ‘‘knitting’s for old ladies’’). Neither of these women were forced into doing these things; when you can get your whole living room from IKEA it definitely would have saved money and time to just buy some readymade curtains, but my mum wanted to make them, she enjoyed hunting through her favourite fabric warehouse and choosing the finest material and she enjoyed making something that fit our windows millimetre perfect.

I must have been about eight; my grandmother was looking after us during the Easter holidays when she insisted that we learned how to sew. We made felt Easter egg holders, mine was light blue with a white bunny on the front, (in hindsight not the best idea as chocolate doesn’t take well to being huddled) but the intention was pure and it’s a skill I’m now very grateful for. Sewing is extremely therapeutic. You have to be slow to focus on the task, so I know that when I decide to sew something it will be a time consuming process, but weirdly when I find myself feeling bad because of that all too common procrastination guilt (most commonly found whilst on Facebook) I’m able to look down and have this thing that I have made, and it fits me, and no you cannot just go and buy it in a shop - because it’s my time well spent.

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Matthew Bourne's 'Sleeping Beauty' 

The curtain rose to the conventional story-book opening: ‘Once upon a time there were a King and Queen who wanted a child...’ all gothic lettering, Bible script stuff. The set was simple, the costumes traditional.  However, having already seen the first two productions from Matthew Bourne’s Tchaicovsky series; the sensational Nutcracker! and an all-male Swan Lake, I’m anticipating peculiarity.

There it is! A baby doll princess marionette. Creepy as a two-month old whose movements were being operated by adults could be really (didn’t really help that I’m a fan of Trainspotting so a baby climbing up the walls will always send a shiver down my spine) but these guys are dancers not puppeteers so we mustn’t be too judgemental.

Oh. It’s all a farce. In the following scene Carabosse, the dark fairy, employs her minions to show us her curse and a faceless Aurora is led in by two sprites who become her ‘puppeteers’. With ease they contorted her body into ways that seemed so unnatural that despite the fact you know everything has been choreographed, when her body finally goes limp and she is thrown over the shoulder of one before being carelessly chucked off stage, it is hard to believe she is not just a ragdoll.

The performance continues and Bourne has strayed a little from the tale told by Grimm’s. It’s Aurora’s birthday but instead of the nobles presenting their dull gifts in a stuffy ballroom, we’re given a garden party where suitor after suitor is toyed with by an extremely assertive young Sleeping Beauty. By this time we’ve been told that the dark fairy is dead and it’s her son we need to watch out for, a ghostly man dressed in a long leather coat with slicked black hair and too-tight trousers enters (the resemeblance to a Camden goth is unnerving). He's holding a black rose and it becomes apparent the story-book spindle has been also been replaced.

Boune’s Sleeping Beauty is certainly a more sinister version but I think all the better for it. The music remains unspoiled but the dancers are able to show their versatility with a more challenging plot. Managing to dance blindfolded, in synchronisation, whilst maintaining a graceful stance, on fast-moving conveyer belts: it's quite the spectacle. The only thing that irritated me was the woman on my left (my eighty-nine year old grandmother, the former ballet teacher) who tutted that they had deviated from the traditional story.

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These Associations

I was completely divided over whether or not to return to Tino Sehgal's ’installation’ at the Turbine Hall this summer. My first visit had left me so exhilarated that I was terrified I would destroy the memory in a similar way to how I’ve managed to ruin so many books by re-reading them at a time in my life when the circumstances were so greatly different that there was no chance I could evoke the same feelings a second time round.

‘These Associations’ is a performance art piece launching the opening of the Tanks – an intriguing new space at the Tate Modern this year. It involves forty or so people walking, running, dancing, marching, chanting, sometimes in obviously choreographed patterns, sometimes quite arbitrarily, taking hold of the room that contains them. As is customary, visitors to the Turbine Hall are expected to walk amongst and get up close and personal with the selected artist’s work, but this is a completely different experience. It begins with confusion as those who come to spectate look upon each other expectantly, not sure of who is part of the show and who is not. Suddenly you’ll notice one person break off from the rest, he’ll approach you and start to speak.

From there on in, it is just you and the person talking. They’ll tell you a story, something extraordinarily personal and you’re so shocked that you haven’t had to wade through hours of small talk or years of loyal friendship to be gifted with this trust that when in the next moment your eye contact is broken and the person with whom you were just speaking has disappeared back into the pack, you feel an overwhelming sense of longing for this lost companion. It doesn’t matter that they have gone through an audition and been selected by Sehgal presumably so that there is not overlap between narratives, it doesn’t matter that it has probably already been told to fifty others that day, it doesn’t even matter if what they were saying was true -  because at that moment you felt chosen.

I won’t repeat the stories that I was told but I greedily stayed for hours trying to hear them all.  When I left the space, suddenly all the people around me were no longer just Sims characters going about their day in self-interest  - abruptly they had become real again and I realised I was staring at people on the tube, genuinely interested in where they might be going.

Now I find myself in a place where the language barrier can physically prevent me from understanding a person’s back story and it’s all I want. The power in Sehgal’s work comes not from an imposition of information, where the viewer is merely pointed in the direction of an idea and then it is up to him or her to delve further; rather he grips his audience, and one by one, forces you to remember what it is to feel fascinated by things – and people – who are not part of your bubble.

After a period of feeling underwhelmed by ‘art’ I’ve since realised it was me and not the work that was the problem. I wasn’t listening or really trying hard enough to unearth what was on display - I had become a cynic – now I’m experiencing things with an unpolluted mind and everything excites me again. Thank you Tino Sehgal.