Breakfast in Brum
Nov. 17th, 2006 12:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusHabit is a great deadener, said Sam Beckett, and it's one of the reasons I travel so much. Locked into socialization and habituation, we stop seeing what the world around us is actually like. We see the past, and we see the hype, rather than the present, and the reality. I really feel that I only grasp the gist of a place during my first 24 hours there -- hours of disorientation, perplexity, and frustration, for the most part. Residents and natives know more facts about where they live, but it's the arriving newcomer who really gets the feel of the place.
When I left Berlin for Birmingham, Hisae shouted "Iiiiiiiii naaaaaaaaa! I'm jealous! You'll be able to eat English breakfast!" It isn't a given. On the British Airways flight things aren't looking promising, foodwise. Following the model of the budget airlines, BA now charges for food. The first thing I see on the menu is Cup-A-Soup (a tangy, sweet instant soup powder). A mug costs several pounds.
Host Greg, who meets me at the airport -- and proceeds to give me, thanks to a series of unexpected roadworks, a tour of Birmingham's motorway system -- tells me that the only good food I'm likely to encounter in Brum is the bratwurst being sold at the German Christmas fair. Apparently the centre of town is full of tiny chalets selling gluhwein and sausages. On loan from Frankfurt.
When I go hunting for breakfast the next morning, I discover the truth of Greg's words. The pedestrian centre of Birmingham is full of familiar retail chains -- Boots, Habitat -- but there are no small businesses, the sort of places where cooking gets done. Everything's pre-packaged, pre-prepared, cold, slick, global. One place says "Cut sandwiches... sausage and egg?" The question mark -- and the lack of tables -- puts me off. I end up eating at a slick chain called "Eat: Real Food". They offer cold dishes in plastic boxes; sushi, feta salad, Thai noodles with cashews. I opt for the latter. It's bland beyond words. And expensive.
The lead story in The Guardian is about the government's plans to make a website listing convicted paedophiles, so that single mothers entering relationships can check whether their new partner is a Humbert Humbert. But Humbert didn't kill Lolita: the Guardian illustrates its story with a photo of a little girl murdered by a paedophile and the caption "Sarah Payne, the eight-year-old whose murder by Roy Whiting in 2000 led to demands for greater disclosure about the whereabouts of known paedophiles." The implication seems to be that paedophiles are killers. What isn't raised is the possibility that paedophiles are more likely to become killers in an moral environment where their crime is considered tantamount to -- and all of a piece with -- murder.
What's also clear is that the Guardian's agenda is being set here by the UK tabloids. "Calls" and "demands" for disclosure of information about sex offenders turn out to be down to "tabloid pressure"; the true motor of this story is clear when you look at The Sun's front page, which says: "Perv hunt dot com: website names wanted paedos -- see them here." Whatever it says about paedophilia, it says a lot about British treatment of "the other" -- and about the way the tabloids here often set the moral agenda for both the broadsheets and the government.
Birmingham is high-Gini. On the way in, we drive through Handsworth, full of Caribbean and subcontinental people, huge SIkh temples, Chinese groceries. It feels vital, poor, and slightly dangerous. Indeed, Birmingham has seen a big increase in gun crime recently; two black girls were killed in a gang shoot out, and the nephew of a colleague of Greg's was also shot on the street. Greg goes a lot to Moscow, and we agree that Britain is getting as polarized and as cowboy-like as Russia. Despite boasting street names commemorating engineers like Brunel, Birmingham doesn't have heavy industry any more -- the Byrd's Custard Factory is now a listed building housing artists' studios, the canal has been cleaned up, and yuppie condos dot the jewellery district.
This sense of wealth and poverty side-by-side lends the city an urgency of pace. It's not the kind of place where you'd dawdle over a greasy fry-up in a friendly caff. In a post-industrial city the only options are drug-related crime, some kind of service industry job, or being a loser. So Birmingham has this contrast between soft and hard, safe zones and danger zones. Soft-and-safe is shopping, marketing, luxury, self-indulgence; chatting to your friend on your mobile phone as you walk through the Mailbox, a luxury shopping centre housing the BBC headquarters. Soft is my hotel, the slick Malmaison, which is "premium marketing-designed" in that terribly British way.
By "premium marketing-designed" I mean that graphic designers and marketers have made something over to allow it to pass as a luxury product and therefore command inflated prices. It's rebranding something upmarket not based on any really expensive new contents, but on a series of luxury signifiers. It's very British, because Britain doesn't really want to put the time and love into really improving quality of life, but it does want to hoist prices. The Malmaison is staffed, like so many service industries here, by Polish desk staff; 600,000 Poles have arrived in Britain over the last couple of years. They seem motivated, their English is excellent, and they handle the brashness of complaining customers with steely firmness.
There certainly are things to grumble about. The first thing the hotel does is charge £50 to your card in case you run off without paying for the extras (like the porn that appears the moment you turn on the TV). The lack of trust isn't misplaced; despite the expensive ambience, someone seems to have peed in one of the lifts. Presumably he was caught by the all-seeing CCTV eye, but that doesn't stop the smell. The room -- tastefully decorated with low-hanging orange and brown lampshades -- is full of amusing signs. Instead of "Shampoo" and "Conditioner" and "Do Not Disturb" and "Please Make Up Room", the signs say "Soft as a feather" and "Fresh as a daisy" and "I want to be alone" and "Room upside down" (printed, cleverly, upside down).
So, a few slipping glimpses of an unfamiliar town in my motherland. Each time I come back, this country seems harder, slicker -- and softer too, if you can afford the soft bits, that is; the spa, the mortgage on the "exclusive" property. In some ways the megalithic slickness of the post-industrial capitalism here makes Britain resemble Japan -- and many Japanese, like Hisae, love Britain and feel at home here. But there are big differences. It isn't just that the mobile phones people depend on so much here are still (ten years after my web-capable Nokia) unable to offer full web access, let alone video like their Japanese counterparts. It's not just that Japan has protected its small businesses, or that it retains a sense that it's worth doing things well for their own sake (rather than just marketing things as "luxuries"). Japanese citizens also have a sense of basic kindness, respect, trust and discretion towards each other. That may, it's true, lead to Japanese paedophiles getting away with their crimes. But better that than tabloid-led witch-hunts which turn them -- in the public mind, and eventually their own -- into murderers.
When I left Berlin for Birmingham, Hisae shouted "Iiiiiiiii naaaaaaaaa! I'm jealous! You'll be able to eat English breakfast!" It isn't a given. On the British Airways flight things aren't looking promising, foodwise. Following the model of the budget airlines, BA now charges for food. The first thing I see on the menu is Cup-A-Soup (a tangy, sweet instant soup powder). A mug costs several pounds.
Host Greg, who meets me at the airport -- and proceeds to give me, thanks to a series of unexpected roadworks, a tour of Birmingham's motorway system -- tells me that the only good food I'm likely to encounter in Brum is the bratwurst being sold at the German Christmas fair. Apparently the centre of town is full of tiny chalets selling gluhwein and sausages. On loan from Frankfurt.
When I go hunting for breakfast the next morning, I discover the truth of Greg's words. The pedestrian centre of Birmingham is full of familiar retail chains -- Boots, Habitat -- but there are no small businesses, the sort of places where cooking gets done. Everything's pre-packaged, pre-prepared, cold, slick, global. One place says "Cut sandwiches... sausage and egg?" The question mark -- and the lack of tables -- puts me off. I end up eating at a slick chain called "Eat: Real Food". They offer cold dishes in plastic boxes; sushi, feta salad, Thai noodles with cashews. I opt for the latter. It's bland beyond words. And expensive.
The lead story in The Guardian is about the government's plans to make a website listing convicted paedophiles, so that single mothers entering relationships can check whether their new partner is a Humbert Humbert. But Humbert didn't kill Lolita: the Guardian illustrates its story with a photo of a little girl murdered by a paedophile and the caption "Sarah Payne, the eight-year-old whose murder by Roy Whiting in 2000 led to demands for greater disclosure about the whereabouts of known paedophiles." The implication seems to be that paedophiles are killers. What isn't raised is the possibility that paedophiles are more likely to become killers in an moral environment where their crime is considered tantamount to -- and all of a piece with -- murder.What's also clear is that the Guardian's agenda is being set here by the UK tabloids. "Calls" and "demands" for disclosure of information about sex offenders turn out to be down to "tabloid pressure"; the true motor of this story is clear when you look at The Sun's front page, which says: "Perv hunt dot com: website names wanted paedos -- see them here." Whatever it says about paedophilia, it says a lot about British treatment of "the other" -- and about the way the tabloids here often set the moral agenda for both the broadsheets and the government.
Birmingham is high-Gini. On the way in, we drive through Handsworth, full of Caribbean and subcontinental people, huge SIkh temples, Chinese groceries. It feels vital, poor, and slightly dangerous. Indeed, Birmingham has seen a big increase in gun crime recently; two black girls were killed in a gang shoot out, and the nephew of a colleague of Greg's was also shot on the street. Greg goes a lot to Moscow, and we agree that Britain is getting as polarized and as cowboy-like as Russia. Despite boasting street names commemorating engineers like Brunel, Birmingham doesn't have heavy industry any more -- the Byrd's Custard Factory is now a listed building housing artists' studios, the canal has been cleaned up, and yuppie condos dot the jewellery district.
This sense of wealth and poverty side-by-side lends the city an urgency of pace. It's not the kind of place where you'd dawdle over a greasy fry-up in a friendly caff. In a post-industrial city the only options are drug-related crime, some kind of service industry job, or being a loser. So Birmingham has this contrast between soft and hard, safe zones and danger zones. Soft-and-safe is shopping, marketing, luxury, self-indulgence; chatting to your friend on your mobile phone as you walk through the Mailbox, a luxury shopping centre housing the BBC headquarters. Soft is my hotel, the slick Malmaison, which is "premium marketing-designed" in that terribly British way.
By "premium marketing-designed" I mean that graphic designers and marketers have made something over to allow it to pass as a luxury product and therefore command inflated prices. It's rebranding something upmarket not based on any really expensive new contents, but on a series of luxury signifiers. It's very British, because Britain doesn't really want to put the time and love into really improving quality of life, but it does want to hoist prices. The Malmaison is staffed, like so many service industries here, by Polish desk staff; 600,000 Poles have arrived in Britain over the last couple of years. They seem motivated, their English is excellent, and they handle the brashness of complaining customers with steely firmness.There certainly are things to grumble about. The first thing the hotel does is charge £50 to your card in case you run off without paying for the extras (like the porn that appears the moment you turn on the TV). The lack of trust isn't misplaced; despite the expensive ambience, someone seems to have peed in one of the lifts. Presumably he was caught by the all-seeing CCTV eye, but that doesn't stop the smell. The room -- tastefully decorated with low-hanging orange and brown lampshades -- is full of amusing signs. Instead of "Shampoo" and "Conditioner" and "Do Not Disturb" and "Please Make Up Room", the signs say "Soft as a feather" and "Fresh as a daisy" and "I want to be alone" and "Room upside down" (printed, cleverly, upside down). So, a few slipping glimpses of an unfamiliar town in my motherland. Each time I come back, this country seems harder, slicker -- and softer too, if you can afford the soft bits, that is; the spa, the mortgage on the "exclusive" property. In some ways the megalithic slickness of the post-industrial capitalism here makes Britain resemble Japan -- and many Japanese, like Hisae, love Britain and feel at home here. But there are big differences. It isn't just that the mobile phones people depend on so much here are still (ten years after my web-capable Nokia) unable to offer full web access, let alone video like their Japanese counterparts. It's not just that Japan has protected its small businesses, or that it retains a sense that it's worth doing things well for their own sake (rather than just marketing things as "luxuries"). Japanese citizens also have a sense of basic kindness, respect, trust and discretion towards each other. That may, it's true, lead to Japanese paedophiles getting away with their crimes. But better that than tabloid-led witch-hunts which turn them -- in the public mind, and eventually their own -- into murderers.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-17 11:42 am (UTC)As for the 'soft' side - this seems part of the infantilised British culture that has developed over the past twenty years or so.
It's linked in my mind with a phenomena I've noticed as politics get harder, more brutal. Britain, like America, is becoming an endlessly sentimental society and, with that sentimentality, comes a corresponding lack of real concern for those at the bottom, "the other." We grieve for fluffy doe-eyed kitten issues but ignore the plight of unphotogenic millions. It's a big stick for those we deem undeserving of inclusion and endless soppy (superficial) concern for those we identify with.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-17 12:07 pm (UTC)And I've noticed how marketing has incorporated a sort of dirty seaside postcard element -- on Be Air, flying between Norwich and Edinburgh a couple of months ago, I was surprised to hear the stewardess announced as "Lotta Cleavage". By the captain. So there was this anxiety about terrorism and turbulence -- the hard world, getting harder, and dominated by "the politics of fear" -- and there was this comforting, slick, smutty customer relations thing going on at the same time. Rabid fear of the other and twee whimsy amongst our own, two sides of the same coin.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-18 09:41 am (UTC)The world is changing, because people are moving, and more of them, more quickly, than ever before. Last year, according to the Office for National Statistics, 200,000 UK citizens emigrated from the UK, while 565,000 people legally immigrated here. You probably have to go back to the Saxon invasions of the 5th century to find a comparable rapid transformation of the population of Britain. I wonder if the one-million-plus people who have left the UK since 2000 may be causing it to change even more than the people coming in. If - like you - they don't like the way the country's going, they simply leave and go somewhere nicer. But then their niceness is removed from the sum total of niceness remaining. And how quickly can you turn the half-a-million new citizens a year into a society? Most of them are coming to Britain primarily for material advancement, rather than to deepen their attachment to the dreaming spires of its Gothic Cathedrals. So inevitably the society becomes more materialistic, high-Gini. Less a society, in fact.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-18 03:46 pm (UTC)I'm fucking off to France next year, hopefully just in time for The Segolene Royal Era.
Shame she's just Tony Blair with tits.
It'll certainly be interesting to see how much the French'll let her get away with in that line of things.
That's one electorate you fuck with at your peril.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-17 09:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-18 10:15 am (UTC)By the way, have been meaning to mention this for a while: Christian Schad, 1927, "Whistling Round the Corner" (Der Pfiff um die Ecke)... I now know your face and where you came from my dear NicePimmelKarl, do I win a prize? I should imagine that nice Mr Schad would be pleased and amused at all the scrapes you get yourself into.
I'm William Nicholson, me. Far more respectable.
opiate of the moderators
Date: 2006-11-18 04:41 pm (UTC)gosh, & there was I thinking LJgodz
had had a hissy fit ovah that there icon...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-17 11:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-17 12:09 pm (UTC)paedophiles
Date: 2006-11-17 12:29 pm (UTC)good article. It might be worth mentioning chris morris´s tackling of this rabid tabloid scare mongering in his great Brass eye special on paedophiles.
These people dont deserve punishment. They deserve gunishment. :)
Re: paedophiles
Date: 2006-11-17 03:30 pm (UTC)Re: paedophiles
Date: 2006-11-17 08:43 pm (UTC)we was laughing. (listen..i was a bit drunk ..u know that bukkake invitation)...nevertheless we sort something out one day.....just you and me, u know what i mean.
Re: paedophiles
Date: 2006-11-18 07:07 am (UTC)http://www.harriet.kattare.com/dailykos/diary1.html
Re: paedophiles
Date: 2006-11-18 07:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-17 12:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-17 12:58 pm (UTC)I think you would enjoy "Mr Egg", a cheapish breakfasty place, authentic rather than faux retro down towards (our small) chinatown. My favourite joke is still "When it's 8pm in London, it's still 1974 in Birmingham" despite being proud of this city.
I'm not going to try and persuade you of the joys of the balti triangle, the vibrant music scene, Artsfest (sanitised but good) in September or wandering up the canals, but you know - there's more to us than the Bullring. (And I *love* the FutureSystems building!)
Thanks for the thoughtful post. Next time, stay at the Hotel Du Vin - it's altogether quieter and more restrained.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-17 08:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-17 10:39 pm (UTC)Custard
Date: 2006-11-17 01:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-17 01:35 pm (UTC)Have you seen Moseley yet?
The last time I went you could buy a sort-of english breakfast from the Kitchen at The Custard factory, and the Custard factory is almost always empty now since everyone's in The Bull Ring.
British Isles??! PAEDOPH-isles, more like !!!
Date: 2006-11-17 02:18 pm (UTC)can we make a further (and necessary) distinction between 'paedophiles' (which, entemologically, merely means 'someone with an attraction toward children'), child abusers (who act on that attraction in psychologically / physically abusive ways) and (as you correctly point out) child murderers? They are three (cumulative) stages along a continuum. The first is as natural (or unnatural) as any other perversion, in my mind.
PS: Momus - many moons ago there used to be an essay of yours floating about the web called something like 'How To Write Controversial Songs Like Momus' (I'm serious!). It was tongue-in-cheek I guess, but still seemed quite useful. Do you know if I can still find it?
Re: British Isles??! PAEDOPH-isles, more like !!!
Date: 2006-11-17 02:21 pm (UTC)http://imomus.com/index20.html
:D
Re: British Isles??! PAEDOPH-isles, more like !!!
Date: 2006-11-17 02:41 pm (UTC)Re: British Isles??! PAEDOPH-isles, more like !!!
Date: 2006-11-17 03:59 pm (UTC)Hell isn't what it used to be.
Business People discover that Money is Bad
Date: 2006-11-17 03:15 pm (UTC)The Psychological Consequences of Money
Kathleen D. Vohs,1* Nicole L. Mead,2 Miranda R. Goode3
Money has been said to change people's motivation (mainly for the better)
and their behavior toward others (mainly for the worse). The results of
nine experiments suggest that money brings about a self-sufficient
orientation in which people prefer to be free of dependency and
dependents. Reminders of money, relative to nonmoney reminders, led to
reduced requests for help and reduced helpfulness toward others. Relative
to participants primed with neutral concepts, participants primed with
money preferred to play alone, work alone, and put more physical distance
between themselves and a new acquaintance.
1 Department of Marketing, Carlson School of Management, University of
Minnesota, 3-150 321 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.
2 Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahasse, FL
32306–4301, USA.
3 Marketing Division, Sauder School of Business, University of British
Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada.
Interesting that a business school finds out that money makes you selfish ...
/bug
Re: Business People discover that Money is Bad
Date: 2006-11-17 04:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-17 03:27 pm (UTC)http://www.septicisle.info/archive/2005_09_11_septicisle_archive.html
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-17 03:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-17 09:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-18 01:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-18 10:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-17 04:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-17 09:07 pm (UTC)chuckidaboud.
NPK
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-17 09:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-18 02:44 am (UTC)Off Subject -- Scott Walker doc trailer
Date: 2006-11-17 11:22 pm (UTC)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYWGQMqC74&eurl
Re: Off Subject -- Scott Walker doc trailer
Date: 2006-11-18 02:49 am (UTC)I can't wait to see it, all the intelligence just bursts forth, attacking and kissing my soul!!
Re: Off Subject -- Scott Walker doc trailer
Date: 2006-11-18 01:16 pm (UTC)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-WTj9y236A
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-18 01:34 am (UTC)Everybody's crazy about pedophiles these days. Now, I wasn't alive until 1986, but I hear the child scare back then (in the US) was satanic daycare centers? There's always something. There always has to be an enemy abroad, and an enemy at home. What was the scare in the 90's? Maybe it was racists or something.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-18 02:58 am (UTC)It's so hard to say with these things, because when technology gets in the loop of trying to prevent what it can also enable (ie. getting whereabouts on everyone while simultaneously raising the ire of paedophiles and in a sense 'challenging' them) you get a neverending battle of one-uppage. I tend to prefer anything that veers on the less surveilant side.
Also, though not in the case of this poor little lass that you brought up, I am shocked at the ignorance of people who categorize anything under the age eighteen as "paedophilia". If the person in question is nubile and thereby pubescent, this attraction is ephebophilia and therein lies a vital psychological/situational difference (it is tolerated in most cultures, whether marital or not, as a legitimate fascination--they are childbearing, afterall).
Focusing on anything "statutory" or with automatic damnation is only preventing quicker and more appropriate social justice for the worst of the worst. The human spectrum is nothing if not wide.
ephebe
Date: 2006-11-18 04:58 pm (UTC)- a disingenous lie, predicated on a lack
of understanding of the Greek relationship in question.
***
Even the Romans got sniffy: Livy criticised Hasdrubal not for "grooming"
his nevvy, but for keeping the young man
within the elder's tent i.e. not introducing him to the wider world, as
such a relationship was intended to do.
The ephebe was ephemeral, and not nubile
(even if one is imaginative about the location of "first beard", the terms
clearly belong to one gender or the other
- the fems phased into "marriagable", were married off, the end. The ephebe became a voting citizen).
***
I still think that prick Woodhead was seriously in error, fucking schoolgirls
while in the government school policy
frontline. That's not as grim as kidnapping a pre-adolescent girl from a bath, assailing her, and leaving her naked in a street. So I agree with your argument about a gamut.
***
The stupid media paradox that Chris Morris did not address is that a "Megan's Law" is deferred or diluted on the grounds that men who want sex with people who usually would be too young for cruising encounters would disappear completely and never be found if they were too identifiable. Six of the disappeared had their pics shown this week
(and that *without* the law on proximate socialising through a single mother having driven them underground). So simply trying to track them as badly as
the SOR does was sufficient to make a fraction disappear anyway.
Re: ephebe
Date: 2006-11-19 12:06 am (UTC)Let's not overanalyse.
Re: ephebe
Date: 2006-11-19 12:09 am (UTC)I'm discussing this in the way that Japanese culture fetishizes nubile females in various ways, some more subtle and complex than others.
Hi Momus
Date: 2006-11-18 06:34 am (UTC)I live my life out loud but became concerned about privacy when the police department I work for decided to run a level two security check on me gee whiz, took all my indiscreet stuff on herpes, gangbangs, bulimia and explosives down, at least until the check clears. So my LJ blog is dead.
In the meantime, as I have mentioned before, have abandoned LJ for better pastures. I know you're over here for the time being, but we'll get you over there eventually. And then we'll be somewhere else, teee heee you cannot keep up.
best always
zzberlin (http://www.myspace.com/zzberlin)
Re: Hi Momus
Date: 2006-11-18 06:59 am (UTC)Re: Hi Momus
Date: 2006-11-19 12:09 am (UTC)How can they?! You did nothing illegal.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-18 02:15 pm (UTC)Absolutely - and don't forget the broadcast media in this analysis. I used to work for one of the BBC's national radio networks, and the editor of the breakfast programme would openly say he wasn't interested in covering stories unless they were also getting coverage in the Sun and the Daily Mail.
As far as I can see, the whole (wrong) conflation of 'paedophile' with 'child molester' seems to have been achieved in the popular psyche already. The conflation of 'child molester' with 'child murderer' is the logical next step for those intent on using one of the few remaining moral absolutes that has close to universal popular support, in order to manipulate the law to achieve their conservative agenda.
The fact that the majority of people who molest children are not paedophiles in a scientific sense is ignored. The fact that a tiny number of child victims are molested, far less abducted, and far less killed by predatory paedophile strangers means to me that creating panics about these few cases in order to further social engineering plans is both despicable and dangerous. The parents who naturally enough focus on these reports, end up missing the real dangers to children - starting with abuse by family members and friends.
msg morality
Date: 2006-11-18 05:09 pm (UTC)Well, if stupid airline paranoia bans one's comfort Thermos,
the £3 cup-a-soup is almost inevitable. There is, however,
plenty of decent Indian food in Brum, including good thali
selections (one doesn't have to eat fahl). The best food was
probably in the "scary" bits you avoided.
The Oxford Malmaison used to be the prison: hard and soft
are at their most jarringly juxtaposed, complete with
handcuffs (as not used in the prison) on the markety
brochures. I think the chain is very well named.
The _Oxford Mail_ headlines include the girls influenced
by _Hard Candy_ (but too soft to go quite so far) who hang
out in chatrooms picking up evident older men keen on
schoolgirls, then post pix on their vigilante webspace of
chaps being not only looking for their dates to show, but
looking rather foolish.
Barnett Newman
Date: 2006-11-19 09:47 am (UTC)Or did you?
For the record, I visited the original "Voice of Fire" just today. It's in Canada's National Gallery, in Ottawa. It's very large. It's in the same room as Rothko's #16.