A peaceful Monday morning after an action-packed weekend. Definitely the most fun festival of the season so far, the Acoustic Cafe meant a band competition lost due to incompetencies among the judges(!) but a weekend of lots of fun and great music. Dread Clampitt and the awesome Red Stick Ramblers played on stage and then lived up to their party-loving reputation by jamming with us till the sun came up two nights in a row, in a state of glorious, riotous drunkenness, yowling Cajun harmonies and slapping basslines between swigs on the bourbon bottle. Back now to Greensboro and the arrival of another English visitor has meant the arrival of highly uncharacteristic grey, rainy weather. Somehow this always seems to happen when my guests arrive...
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The end of the football season and, oh joy, the start of Test cricket. Bangladesh are currently letting us run all over them as a warm-up for the Ashes, but more importantly, I can get the true sound of England beamed to Alabama through Test Match Special . Joy. For all you Americans who don't understand us Brits, just listen to Test Match Special for the next few months and maybe, just maybe, you may get an insight into the English psyche that will explain everything... I'd been missing the smack of leather on willow, to use the time-honoured cliche. Over at the Guardian over-by-over commentary, the readership are delightedly reacquainting themselves with each other and looking forward to a summer of pretending to work while really just clicking 'refresh' and sending in silly emails. I've got a lot of work to do so I'm banning myself from the Guardian site but one can, I think, listen to TMS while working...
Another incredible afternoon of football. I left my laptop to go to a meeting with the contractor who will be building the next iteration of our house, to come back and find it 3-3...the tension! the excitement! what a comeback!! For luck I played the John Peel mix of the commentary to that previous famous Liverpool goal in the 1981 European Cup which intros his last Fabric Live CD...calling on his spirit to enable a repeat...but none was forthcoming... And then, twice in a week, I have to endure a penalty shootout, and twice in a week, what a result! This is, obviously, so much bigger than the FA Cup. I'm so happy for Liverpool. They deserved this (and, let's face it, we really didn't...) It's huge and historic, exactly what football is about and I'm feeling it. But now, I've got to shoot off to go give a fiddle lesson...
I've had another dive into researching a part of the world I know nothing about - China and Australia. All I know about the one is the stereotype of billions of skyscrapers being built every year and the onrush of a scary form of urbanism while peasants in villages still live in hovels. All I knew about the other, until a few hours ago, was Glenn Murcutt and his disciples. Now I've trawled through virtually the whole archive of the journal Architecture Australia I know something more - at least, some sense of orientation in the world of Australian architecture, its concerns, priorities and strengths. There was some surprisingly good writing in the journal, especially compared to the sycophantic British rags - a sense of genuine debate and questioning about the direction or architecture and urban design, some actual criticism (god forbid) of the buildings and schemes featured, and some more polemic essays on a variety of themes from how to design for/with Aboriginal communiti...
Hooray! someone with a digital camera sent me a CD of their pictures of Alabama - and when that someone is a trained photographer, this results in a very flattering picture of my very small house on Pig Roast day, so those of you who've been clamouring to see the results of my labour (or labor), here it is... (Thanks, Justine!)
potato salad and corn-on-the-cob
Post pig-roast and all the accompanying business, and now that I am living alone in the vastness of Beacon Street, my culinary habits are returning to their idosyncratic norm. No flatmate to look aghast when I start chopping up fish heads, as I did last night, to make a fish soup (does no-one know that the cheeks are the best bit?) No-one to have to share my freshly made pesto with. No-one to think I'm strange to eat potato salad and corn-on-the-cob for dinner (no meat? what?) I'm sorry, but despite the prominence of the dish in their culinary culture, American's don't know how to make potato salad. Mostly what they make is mush. What's the deal with the semi-mashed potatoes, the sour cream and mayonnaise, the weird other bits and pieces that they insist on putting in the 'salad'? It's definitely one subject that my food fascism comes out in full force on. Potato salad should have decent-sized chunks of slightly floury potato (each one probably big enou...
YESSSSSSSS!!!!!!!! YESSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!! YESSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!! YESSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!! The grand fromage who confidently told me that he'd be heading back to Highbury on the team plane with the cup, well it didn't look like he was going to be right, but YES! that's the way it goes. Oh, the joy. I can't believe it. That's too much wracked nerves for before midday. Thanks to the Guardian reader who pointed those of us in internet limbo to the live radio commentary on (of all things) MUTV which ensured that I heard every minute of the last half and nearly had several coronaries in the process. But WE WON IT!!
It's FA Cup final and I'm sitting in Gooner hell - that is in my kitchen with no radio, no TV, no nothing remotely live except the BBC and Guardian online commentary. I listened joyfully to the pre-match commentary streamed live from Radio 5, and then it all went silent, as the FA ban on live streaming to overseas browsers came into effect. Damn them! So here's me, having just finished my good English fry-up breakfast, pot of tea on the side and resisting the urge to have a beer seeing as it's 9.30am here...I've got to do some work later, regardless of the result, and I know a beer would be highly retrograde... On the pitch it all sounds like it's getting intense. I'm totally jealous of friends who I know are a) there at the stadium and b) in a Gooner pub in London (unless he's testing himself, as he often does, by watching the game with his Man USA-supporting best mate...)
Only in Beacon Street... A wren has started to make a nest in my bedroom, inside an artwork by Butch ! He (or she) found the gap between a seashell, a pickled snake and an election flier for George Wallace and thought it would make a perfect secluded spot to bring up kids. Now I don't know what to do! I feel bad for them if I shut my door, and it's rather amazing seeing how they build a nest, but still, much as I love my feathered friends I'm not really sure if my bedroom is the best place for them...
After yesterday, which was a full day of real work back on site, today was more in the mode of last week - a half day of work followed by a half day of sitting with my laptop trying to get back into the swing of the whole book research thing, and not be distracted by the fact that I've finally got myself a RSS feeder which is supposed to stop me being so distracted by constantly reading blogs and online news but obviously, as a new toy, has done precisely the opposite today. Trying to find more projects in areas we have gaps in is surprisingly difficult when it comes to, of all places, France. Why the dearth of imaginative, participatory projects here? One article I read online posits that it is as a result of political culture favoring uniformity (egalité) over participatory, and therefore idiosyncratic and unequal, decisionmaking processes. But again, with a highly funded arts scene and plenty of artist-run spaces and so forth, aren't some of those artists getting out into t...
I'm not a regular reader of archinect , a site whose aims I applaud but whose occasional degeneracy into the worst depths of architectural gossip, self-congratulation and preening about subject of utter irrelevance to the real world is an inevitable consequence of its aims. However, for some obscure reason I ended up on the site this evening and found myself reading the truly awful discussion forum on the new head of the AA. It's an awful comparison, but is this situation not akin to the whole Malcolm Glazer/Man U debacle? a whole bunch of fans moaning their heads off and trying to predict the future, taking up lots of airspace without realising that most of the rest of the architecture world doesn't give a damn what happens to them because they think you're irrelevant and arrogant (and that's being polite), and the longer you stay with your heads in the sand, the better. Sorry - I do wish the AA the best possible future. But until it loses its Man U (or, more aptly...
Church slogans of the day: HOW TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT - DON'T TELL IT THE BEST VITAMIN FOR A CHRISTIAN - B1 [geddit? Actually, it's all rather confusing because if you are already a Christian, you don't presumably need to B1...] And what footballing traumas today. I'm rather sad, actually, as I was rooting for Crystal Palace to escape relegation due to my fondness for Iain Dowie, his truly committed team and the fantastic pseudo-blog of Aki Riihilahti . My next choice would have been Norwich and I would also have preferred to see Saints survive as I'm fond of Harry Redknapp and his chipper wheeler-dealering. So that West Brom, of all boring Midlands teams, might make it through was not what I wanted at all. And then Birmingham manage to beat us 2-1! Apart from that, yesterday was another bluegrass festival at Blackwater - not as much jamming this time as we'd hoped for, partly due to a rainy interlude, but some good bands on stage, and it's always fun t...
Church mottoes of the day: DUSTY BIBLES LEAD TO DIRTY LIVES A SHUT MOUTH GATHERS NO FOOT Life is slowly returning to normal after a month of visitors and events, which is both a relief and a little sad. It's great to have friends come to see what life is like here, not to mention new company, and seeing one's boyfriend for a week every three and a half months is pretty welcome too...but driving three times to Atlanta within a week makes me not want to step in my car for a good bit of time. But onwards we go, tidying up loose ends with the house and, for me, restarting work on the GPA book. And suddenly the weather has got really hot. Summer has arrived, the little air-conditioner in my room is on for the first time this year, and the mosquitoes are out in force...
Spaghetti with tomato sauce, fresh basil and real parmesan
Again, a lack of posts for which apologies, but for once this is not to do with a lack of decent food...I've been eating unusually well this last week thanks to a visitor from far-flung places who stayed overnight in Atlanta and knew what to buy there for me...so from DeKalb farmers market came a cornucopia of delicious produce which we devoured with glee. I'd forgotten how good real shrimp could be - grey, uncooked ones sauted with a bit of garlic and chilli. And real mozzarella, and tomatoes that actually taste of something. Fresh goats cheese. Pak choi. Real lettuce. Kiwi fruit. Wine all the way from France, Europe. And also, it was so good to have people in town who actually care about food. So, smoked salmon and scrambled egg breakfasts outside in the Alamo, picnics by the river, proper dinners in Beacon Street. Justine and Tom, you probably didn't think any of this was particularly civilised or abnormal, but it was a very long way from my usual solo and gone-to-seed l...
Just surfaced from PIg Roast weekend, which was a fitting ceremonial end to the year (though of course none of use are going home and our projects aren't finished...) The day began early with breakfast under the Great Hall at the Morisette House provided by the good ladies of Newbern - cakes and coffee. The best surprise at this early point was seeing Fred, one of our longstanding inmates who got out on parole a few months ago, returned and standing spruce and happy at the foot of the steps. After the prize for the best 2nd year effort in their watercolour class (such skills still alive and strong in Alabama) and Big Dave's presentation on his work during the year as the Architectural Ambulance, our little house was first on the tour. Mrs Phillips of course stole the show, moving the crowd to tears when she said a few words as we'd asked her to do, and then, after everyone had gone, unexpectedly starting to cry herself, big tears falling down behind her glasses; she's s...
Another election, another Labour win - though the share of the vote speaks eloquently for the urgent need for a reform of our first-past-the-post system. How a 4% majority in the share of the vote can (at the time of writing) translate into a majority of nearly 25% more seats than anyone else is truly undemocratic. And, on a personal level, I'm hugely depressed that in my home constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow George Galloway has won, through a hugely manipulative and destructive campaign aimed at the most underprivileged and ill-informed sections of the population, and undoing so much good, quiet development of a truly mixed and mutually respectful multi-cultural area. Much as I wished that Labour would not win this election (though no other alternative was really imaginable in any sense) in this one constituency - whose former black, Jewish and female MP encompassed everything the Labour Party could hope to symbolise for one of the most ethnically diverse and forward-looking...
Church slogan of the day: EMOTION IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR ACTION With relevance to which...we finished off all our siding today. We have nothing left to do to the outside of the house! (well, until we discover a f***-up.) Onwards and upwards, next task I'm trying to get done are the kitchen cabinets...
A good full day on site today - a week from the Pig Roast and we're nearing completion, which is exciting. Today we put up the tin siding on the back of the house, a subject of some nervousness among the team as we were worried about how it might really look once in place - but luckily even the greatest doubters were converted when we saw it - shiny but not too shiny, surprisingly sophisticated-looking and lovely in the afternoon sun. All the inside of the house is painted now, and we're doing the fiddly stuff like putting up light fixtures and so on. It's exciting to finally see the house come to fruition and how all our paper ideas translate in reality.
spaghetti with spinach, garlic and fresh grape tomatoes
I realised tonight while cooking that it really has been a long time since I actually made myself a meal. Cheese on toast, or miso soup to cure my bout of fever doesn't count. I started to cook...wow, a couple of weeks ago, but got scuppered half way through my risotto by a last-minute dinner invite from a neighbouring Rural Studio-er. I still made my risotto as a side dish and brought it along, but somehow that's not the same a sitting down to a meal that you planned out from start to finish. So tonight's simple spaghetti somehow felt good, especially accompanied by a bottle of Volpaia Chianti that I had saved from a previous Atlanta trip for just such a moment...
One thing I keep meaning to blog about is the plethora of amazing aphorisms found on the signs outside churches. For those of you who have never been to the South, nearly every church (and there are a lot - Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Catholic, AME Zion, Jehovah's Witnesses, Church of Christ, and more) has a sign outside it similar to the ones found outside Burger King, a diner or a gas station - backlit with black letters that you can rearrange to spell everything from 'TRY OUR ULTIMATE WHOPPER $5.99' to 'JESUS SAVES'. I've been trying to keep track of some of my favorites: PRAYER CHANGES THINGS HEADED THE WRONG WAY? GOD ALLOWS U-TURNS [by the side of the four-lane highway] LET HIM TAKE THE FREE GIFT OF THE WATER OF LIFE TRY JESUS HE'S ALRIGHT There are so many more, so this is to be continued...
Back today from a lovely weekend of classic Alabama - bluegrass and telling stories at the top of the mountain at Horse Pens 40 . And all the better for the arrival of the boy, rather culture-shocked from moving between hectic metropolitan life in London to slow-talking, banjo-playing Alabama. It's a transition that doesn't sound that extreme in words but experientially is one of the most shocking changes. The people are mostly old and slightly less old bluegrassers from all over the state who consider themselves fairly normal but are eccentric characters of the first order, telling stories about their geriatric wanderings in their RVs and their past lives from uncles who did their housepainting wearing three coats because the instructions on the tin said 'put on three coats', through to WWII on a battleship in the South Pacific, through to how to get completely bewildered by the English system of roundabouts. The music is jamming with a 13 year old and an 85 year old a...