Sought My Company Voluntarily, Now Regretful

In 2003 I worked for some weeks in Baghdad following the invasion of Iraq, based at the UN headquarters in the Canal Hotel. As many of you probably remember, the Canal Hotel was bombed up on 19 August - shortly after I left the mission - killing many of my friends and colleagues. This is a long way of explaining how I first met Soodad al-Naib, one of the Iraqi staff working in the Humanitarian Information Centre while I was there.

Soodad was injured in the Canal Hotel bombing but after moving to London, she’s made an amazing recovery and is now pursuing a career as an artist. Her paintings are dark and deep, almost abstract but with a mythic storytelling quality. Her work is going to be part of the Untitled Artists Fair in London this year, from Saturday 31st May - Sunday 1st June at Chelsea Old Town Hall. Admission is free but you need to have tickets - download them from this link. Come on, free art! What more could you ask for?

While reading this post, you should be listening to Modern Art by Art Brut.

Rupert and family are moving from the wilds of London to the far more civilised Vancouver Island in Canada, which I believe used to be part of the British Empire until they had their membership revoked for being too close to the US. (Geography fact: Vancouver Island has a larger population than Montenegro.)

I’m proud to say that I knew Rupert before he became a big vlogging star and sold out to The Man - he directed our award-winning (ahem) short film “Tracks”, back when we were in short trousers. For a while I was worried that he would drop out of film-making completely, but he came back from a completely unexpected angle - using his mobile phone camera to shoot and edit short films about his life.

Video-blogging can easily turn into navel-gazing, but he managed to avoid this when he started out by posting what were essentially comedy sketches about a movie geek trapped in a dull office job in his dad’s company. The fact that Rupert was in fact a movie geek trapped in a dull office job in his dad’s company only made the sketches funnier. And sadder. But mainly funnier.

Now he’s all growed up - married to Kate, father of Amy, and no longer working in the dull office job - and his vlogs focus on his real life as opposed to his fantasy life. It’s great stuff, mainly because his slightly manic delivery makes for compelling viewing, but he’s also just a great bloke. Witness one of his recent posts, where he laments the annihilation of the local Post Office and interviews his local PO manager Mrs Patel.

The Minute wishes him the best of British in the New World. Please do keep videoblogging - I would join you, except my cellphone is nowhere near as flash as yours.

Andy and Meg have recorded a new song, but I can’t mention the name of aforementioned song because my parents read this blog. What would they think if they knew that I hung out with people who sample David Lee Roth and sing Dance, Motherfucker, Dance in close harmony?

Whoops.

In other music news, masochist sits through all 763 MP3s submitted to SXSW this year - and reviews every single one of them in 6 words. Now that’s an impressive level of commitment, or possibly just a truckload of drugs. The top pick - what a pick! - were Creature, Canadian pop rock with more vim than my mum’s cleaning cabinet. For your listening pleasure:

Creature - “Brigitte Bardot”

… especially when they feature people I know!

After getting in from Dhaka yesterday, I went for dinner yesterday with Natasha and her husband Richard.  Now I haven’t seen Natasha for about 2 and a 1/2 years (since I finished the tsunami contract with WFP, in fact), so it was a bit weird to meet up with her in London.  Even stranger was her new alternative career as a video model for Indonesian rock bands, as you can see in this clip from Padi….

Apparently one of the comments on YouTube says that the model does a really good job of looking lost - Nats pointed out that she had been in London for exactly four days, had no idea where she was, and so looking lost was remarkably easy.

Nice track, anyway.  The Indonesian equivalent of Coldplay, or something.

If you haven’t seen Gary Cohen’s documentary Judah and Mohammed, you should track it down somewhere and watch it. It gets under the skin of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and after an hour of following two young men - one Israeli Jew, one Palestinian - it gets under the viewers skin as well. What made it especially powerful for me was that you are actually watching Judah and Mohammed grow and change over a period of 18 months, without any sermonising by the documentary makers. It’s this human story that really brings home the futility of the conflict, and the way it distorts people’s lives on both sides.

This was a good excuse to write something about the documentary, since I wasn’t blogging at the time it was screened. However I should also say that Gary is hosting the launch party for The Berakah Project, a group of Christian, Jewish and Muslim musicians on 27th November at St Paul’s Church on Bedford Street in Covent Garden. Too often, these sorts of project turn into a worthy muddle, but the music clips on their site talk of a dynamic blend of different styles with firm roots in the music of the middle east; so head along and enjoy.

A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to befriend Tessa Souter, a British expat living in New York earning her crust as a jazz singer. Since then I’ve seen her a few times - whenever we happen to be in the same city (London, New York, Washington DC) I make sure that I go and see her play. She has a very fresh mainstream style with a pinch of exotic flavours, writes tunes that really come from her heart, and plays with some great musicians. Everybody that I play her album to loves it, which is always a good sign - maybe you should buy a copy for yourself?

If you don’t feel like buying an album solely on the basis of my recommendation (I don’t see why you wouldn’t - I have really good music taste), then there is a very easy way that you can hear Tessa’s music and support her at the same time. Simply click on this here link to Tessa’s MySpace page and you’ll instantly increase her number of hits. This sort of thing impresses record companies, you know, plus you get a chance to listen to some good music while you’re at work. Everybody, as they say, is a winner.

Unless MySpace crashes your browser, which just happened to me twice. I should emphasise that this wasn’t Tessa’s fault, however.

Simon Ostrovsky bets that you don’t, and he’s prepared to make you feel guilty about it. All you need to do is to watch Newsnight on BBC2, this Tuesday at 10:30pm. Apparently the government of Uzbekistan may be involved in some shady dealings (”not again”, I hear you sigh), this time involving the clothing industry. Now usually clothing manufacturers are absolutely above criticism, but who knows? Watch and find out - if you don’t have a television, or you’re in the Balkans, or something crazy like that, then you’ll be able to catch it after tomorrow on Newsnight Video Highlights.

I met Simon Ostrovsky in Berlin, where he sold me a bike that only had one pedal and then disappeared. I forgave him because he makes really interesting documentary shorts, like the recent North Circular Stories that aired on Channel 4 two weeks ago. Obviously I missed them - we don’t get Channel 4 here - but they’ve now been uploaded onto something like YouTube.

The films uncover an underworld of Eastern European migrants in London living in abandoned houses on the city’s infamous North Circular Road, and forming a tight-knit community of Latvian and Lithuanian menial workers, freeloaders and students alike.

I love this format - basically these are the documentary equivalent of pop videos, with three minutes to tell the story and a tendency to get under your skin. There’s no time to present an argument or squeeze a moral out - what you get is people’s lives, edited.

Perfect for our information-saturated culture. Without further ado, I give you - North Circular Stories.

The eternally vigorous Mike Pollitt sent me this flyer for the latest Breakneck Records night out. I appear to be listed as one of the DJs, which is unfortunate as I appear to be quite a long way from London this weekend. Shh - I won’t tell if you won’t.

The good news is that it’s not all about me - this is going to be a night of great music and general shenanigans, all with a blues and soul vibe for the east london crowd. Sunday September 9th at the Old Blue Last - get there early!

p.s. Sorry Mike, but I’ll try to be in town for the next one, and throw down some of those hot rocks.

Six years ago I had a thought. What if you came home from work (or school, or combat, or whatever) and wanted to cook yourself a hearty meal, but when you looked in the cupboard the ingredients you saw just didn’t make any sense? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a service where you dropped in your ingredients and out popped some recipe ideas? The short answer is - yes, it would be great.

Google Recipes eventually came out, which was adequate, but not really what I was looking for - it was a bit unfriendly, plus there was no sense that the people behind it cared about food at all. Fast forward to earlier this year, when I met Brys Stephens at a dinner party given by Gordon Peters in Washington DC. Brys told me about his startup project Cookthink, and it turned out that he and his partners had the same idea - the difference between us being that they’d actually done something with it.

They’ve been blogging for a while (always interesting), but Cookthink Beta launched two weeks ago and it’s great, just like I thought it would be. The only thing I thought they should add would be more of a community element - you know, sharing recipes between members - CookTube, if you will. I’m pretty sure that they’ll get around to it sooner or later, but in the interests of practicing what I preach, I’m going to start posting recipes on this blog.

Although not today.

Six years ago I travelled to New York for the first time, an innocent abroad with only the clothes on my back, etc, etc. A friend of mine gave me the number of a friend of his, and that was how I ended up sleeping on Jenni Wolfson’s couch for most of the week. Although at that point I wasn’t house trained, she didn’t object too much, and I still see her whenever I visit NY.

The last time I saw Jenni, she was leaving her job at UNICEF (where she’d been for years) and had started to spend more time on writing and performing. The result is that she has now staged her one-woman show RASH, which has received great reviews, has been nominated for the Amnesty International / Big Issue Freedom of Expression Award, and is going to the Edinburgh Fringe this year.

I haven’t seen it (and I doubt she’ll be touring Montenegro) but the description reminds me of the play “Fever” by Wallace Shawn, which was an influence on me in the mid-1990s - a personal reflection on the friction between expectation and reality as you travel from the rich world to the poor. Political theatre is having something of a resurgence at the moment (and not just in New York), and if you’re going to the Fringe this year, RASH should be well worth going to.

The jungle drums! They beat to the rhythm of the night! And they were programmed by none other than Nick Faber! Nick always delivers the goods, and it’s a crime that he never made it as a superstar DJ. Still, the dancefloor’s loss is the media world’s gain, and he’s just finished the soundtrack for a new Tiger Beer commercial, which you can watch here.

When I am rich and famous, I shall hire Nick to provide the soundtrack to my life. Everybody should have their own personal soundtrack. Forget about pulling up random broken beat dross on your over-priced iPod - how much would you pay for a top producer to create a personalised score for your daily life?

I sense a business opportunity.

Word reaches me of an upcoming gig in smoke-free London. Needless to say, I won’t be able to attend because - that’s right - I’m out of the country! However I can wholeheartedly recommend it to the Web, even though this is only the second post on this blog and nobody (literally) will be reading it. I think of it as practice, so here’s the announcement:

The ever-louche Alexander’s Festival Hall will be purveying their unique brand of popular music at Tesco Disco on 4th July, at Hedges & Butler at 3 New Burlington Mews. A sample of their tunes can be found (as ever) on MySpace.

Thank you.