The Sunset Bar has possibly the best aspect of any watering hole in the world: huge open terraces look out on the ocean and this eternal beach. Pity its sunny disposition isn’t quite shared by the bar staff: there seems to be a sliding scale of antipathy, from indifference, through surliness, to open hostility, all depending on the prettiness of the bar-thing in question. When we try and sit outside with our drinks to watch the sunset we’re surrounded by barmaids, seagulls round fish: “you can’t sit here! Wrong! 20,000 bucks!”
By Mark Piggott.
He lived his life almost exclusively in London amongst the “dark satanic mills” (there never was a hymn so misconstrued as “Jerusalem”), rejected the establishment’s authority at every turn, from Church, politics to social conventions, and worked doggedly hard for little reward. Blake lived his life in poverty, his work never celebrated except near the end by a coterie of young artists including Samuel Palmer. Seeing this exhibition it seems unbelievable, but maybe the establishment’s acceptance means being reasonable, and he was never a reasonable man, Blake wrote “Reason constrains creativity and passion” and this exhibition is joyously full of both of these things.
Some might disagree with the rare beauty of the scummy entrance in Dean Street, but then they’d go to the Soho House, and quite frankly, they are the type of person you wouldn’t want or expect to meet there. I would be surprised to meet Paris Hilton there, but not surprised to bump into Amy Winehouse, I could imagine Britney Spears in her current state, like Princess Margaret or Sarah Lucas, collapsed drunkenly on the floor.
We were in Damascus, the capital of the Syrian Arab Republic, in one of the dozens of coffee houses that line its streets and alleyways. I had met him at the Immigration Ministry, which I had been forced to visit to renew my Visa. The Ministry building was in the centre of the city, just off Martyrs Square, and it was packed. Crowds of people were milling around on the street in front of it, smoking cigarettes and snapping irritably at each other in Arabic. From what I could tell, by glancing at their green-and-gold passports and listening to the dissimilar sound of their dialect to the local Syrians, the vast majority of them were Iraqi.
The otaku everywhere have begun their grumbling: They’re saying that the success of Japan’s popular culture–anime, manga, food, booze, design and fashion–has turned Akihabara, anime’s former nerve center in Tokyo, into another Disneyland. Tourists dominate the former home of the native otaku–the uber-geeks who gleefully fetishize pop culture merchandise at the expense of virtually everything else in their lives.
Residents of Tauranga in New Zealand were surprised to see a man bringing in the New Year by careering down their road at 50 m.p.h. on the back of a motorized bar stool. The oddness of the scene was only increased by the fact that the man, John Sullivan, was also half-naked and had smoke coming out of his backside. This latter phenomenon came thanks to the newspaper he had rolled up, wedged between his buttocks and set alight. Sullivan later confessed in court to having ‘had a few’ and admitted that a public road wasn’t the best place for a high-speed bar stool. 
The stereotype of Japan’s anime producers as insular, cloistered and sealed off to foreigners was not what Tekkon screenwriter Weintraub encountered when he arrived in 2001. “I found the openness with which people treated me in Japan refreshing,” he tells me from New York, where he runs a film production company with his wife. “Especially within the context of what is supposedly such a closed industry. I felt that everyone I encountered, from Taiyo Matsumoto to the animators to the distributors, treated me the same as they would any writer.”
What I have seen, and only very recently, is a blossoming of coverage in Western media of Japan’s cell phone novel phenomenon. Some of them, when published and sold as text-based novels, sell in the hundreds of thousands; one title sold up to half a million books. These are astounding figures for what we still call ‘the novel’, a narrative conveyed in prose, in whatever language, and generally without visual enticements. They are even more dramatic when text-based anythings—novels, newspapers, short stories—are spiraling into irrelevance.
Preheat the oven to 375F/190C/Gas Mark 5. In a medium pan, sauté the onion and garlic in the oil until soft. Pour this into a large casserole dish and place the chicken on top. Add the beer, stock, tomato, chillies, allspice, cinnamon and a pinch of salt.
