OPEN STREET ART - Art & About Sydney

"Art in unusual places" indeed. This is the motto of Art & About Sydney.

Earlier this week I walked through Darling Quarter and caught Bill and the team setting up a street art installation in the walkway between the North and South Commonwealth Bank towers.

OPEN STREET ART is yet another collaboration between aMBUSH Gallery and the Darling Quarter precinct. The first one being the playful illumination of the precinct's buildings at night.

Friday 21 September marks the launch of Art & About Sydney for the month long celebrations and events. It is also the day OPEN STREET ART officially opens and that this public walkway will be declared a permanent art exhibition/installation space.

It's a great idea and a long time coming for the Darling Quarter precinct, which opened in June 2011. Bordered by the Chinese Garden of Friendship in the far south corner, it adds another dimension to the fringe of the already vibrant Chinatown area. I've been lucky enough to work in one of the swanky, sleek buildings and see the precinct come alive as each brand spanking new cafe or restaurant opened. There seem to still be some commercial spaces available so eventually additional operators will open up, adding even more diversity to the area.

In the meantime there are plenty of cafes, bars, restaurants, ATM's, ping-pong tables (bring your own bats and balls) and a massive children's playground to enjoy. Some tapas, a tipple and frolicking in the sun. The area can be enjoyed by young and old. During nice weather, deck chairs magically appear on the patches of grass for the pleasure and enjoyment of anyone wanting to soak up some sunshine, or as in some cases I've seen, catch up on some much needed sleep.


I feel like a child entering a fair and discovering all the rides to go on. I can't wait to get out and about in Sydney during September and October to see what other installations are waiting to be discovered. Watch this space, Bill tells me there should be another installation exhibited here before the year is out.

Top 6 Epic TV Shows Relating to Food

I’ve always known food had a hold on my life. From the moment I wake up to the time I sleep I seem to be in a suspended state between meals. This would indicate meals are the most important part of my life and everything else, consequently, happens around them

Think about your life. We must eat to survive; it’s as simple as that. Luckily in the first world for the most part, this does not seem to be an issue. In fact we as a modern society seem to be struggling with the reverse - excess.

Then think about those poor people in the third world who don’t have the luxuries we have, or even those living in a lower socio-economic bracket to us, living on or just below the poverty line.

The point is if we’re not thinking about what we’re going to eat; then we’re left with the alternative which is to think about what we don’t have to eat. Either way we’re consumed by food, amongst other things. For us couch potatoes out there, there is even a multitude of television shows and channels exclusively dedicated to our obsession with food.

I’ll be the first to admit there have been many times, especially during this winter, where I should drop the fork, croissant or glass of wine, get off the couch and got for a walk instead. But before I do, I compiled a list of some my favourite television shows which, although perhaps not obvious at first glance, if you take notice, you will also see that these too are centered on our shared obsession of food. These shows not only have food and drink scenes in them; they also explicitly demonstrate the culture surrounding food and drink in our modern day society.

You may ask yourself “why (only) six”? Five is too limiting and six is not as cumbersome as ten. It’s a nice even, single-digit number.

Top 6 Epic TV Shows Relating to Food

1. Seinfeld
2. The Sopranos
3. Friends
4. Entourage
5. True Blood
6. Mad Men

Seinfeld

Seinfeld demonstrates that for a show about nothing, food really is something important and at the centre of our lives. Monk's Cafe is the stage where the crew meet up to eat and spend a lot of their time. Outside of that think Soup Nazi; the mutton Jerry stuffed in the table napkins; George’s boss Mr Steinbrenner and his obsession with calzone; Elaine’s idea of selling muffin tops; the pez dispenser; the marble rye incident; Babu’s failing restaurant; the junior mint and the operation; Kramer getting banned from his local fruit market; the sexual power of mango; the big salad; the falsified non-fat frozen yogurt; the etiquette of dinner parties (wine vs Pepsi); Kramer’s wine appreciation; Jerry’s love of the black and white cookie; and the chocolate babka. 

  

The most mundane in life is elevated to something simultaneously significant, ludicrous and hilarious. “These pretzels are making me thirsty!”

Image sourced from ijk...s

The Sopranos

Tony Soprano loves his food and drink. All night benders; family dinners and functions; mob meetings at restaurants; Satriale’s pork sandwich; breaking bread at Artie Bucco’s Vesuvio; and reheating Carmella’s zini after he gets home from his mob activities. 

Image sourced from Changing Nature of the American Family, photographed by Annie Leibowitz.

Who can forget some of the memorable moments in the show that happen over a meal? Janice murders her fiancé Richie when he sits down to dinner; Tony’s mistress throws a tantrum and a steak at him (8:30mins into video); and Ralph Cifaretto is strangled by Tony in the middle of breakfast preparation.

The final scene of the series even takes place in a diner, where Tony and his immediate family meet up for dinner and dig into a basket of onion rings.

There’s even a cookbook dedicated to the show compiled by the show’s chef character Artie: The Sopranos Family Cookbook: As Compiled by Artie Bucco.

Friends

Where to begin? Firstly, Monica is a chef. The series is predominantly set in two locations: Monica’s apartment and the coffee house Central Perk downstairs. Monica’s apartment has an open plan living area which centers on the kitchen and kitchen table, where the friends drop by pretty much any time of the day. The coffee shop has what seems to be a reserved couch area for the gang to congregate at. If Monica is not cooking and feeding everyone, then they’re at the coffee shop drinking coffee and eating muffins. Sporadically, on special occasions such as dates or the odd birthday you see the gang head out to a fancy restaurant.

Image sourced from The Telegraph

The list is endless, but here are some highlights:

• There’s the long line of Thanksgiving Day feasts, two in particular which stand out.  There’s one where Joey commits to eating a whole turkey and another where Rachel makes a traditional Sheppard’s Pie/Trifle that tastes like feet.
• Monica, in her constant campaign to be liked by others, decides to make candy for the neighbours. The popularity and demand grows so high, that people start lining out her door and even Joey buys into the mob mentality.
• Ross finds out about Joey and Rachel getting together and invites them over to his house for fajitas. In his despair, Ross ends up drinking a whole jug of margaritas and passes out on the couch.
• Monica and Joey go to a cooking class where she pretends it’s her first time cooking, so she can go straight to the top of the class.
• There’s also the one where Monica tries to desperately replicate Phoebe’s grandmother’s chocolate chip cookie recipe.
• Joey never shares food. In one occasion, his date takes fries off his plate. When she goes to the bathroom Joey polishes off her dessert. She comes back, chocolate staining his face and he claims “I’m not even sorry.”!
• Last but not least, we can’t overlook Joey’s obsession with sandwiches. His sister even brings him a meatball sandwich as a buffer when she announces she’s pregnant.

Entourage

If Ari is not taking Eric to Koi to verbally abuse him, the boys are having breakfast and scoping out the chicks at Urth Caffé. Take your pick from Hollywood power lunches, dinner dates, hitting up the children’s BBQ area at a bat mitzvah, boozing it up in the VIP area of a club or a pool party. Most important of all they have Johnny Drama who’s role in the family is the cook. He’s obsessed with nutrition, fitness and providing his baby bro Vincent with the right foods to give him the energy and vitality he needs to be one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.

Image sourced from We Eat Films

True Blood

This show’s premise is that vampires walk the earth and are part of mainstream society. They survive by drinking Trueblood, the synthetic blood drink developed by the Japanese in order to feed the world’s vampire population. Of course there is always the alternative of people as food; human blood bags walking around just ripe for the picking.

There’s Merlotte’s Bar & Grill and Fangtasia (a vampire bar) where a lot of the action takes place.

Image sourced from US Weekly

One of the highlights is definitely Lafayette, Merlotte’s eccentric, gay, short order cook that injects some glitz and glamour into redneckville.

This week Amazon sent me a list of books I might like including True Blood: Eats, Drinks, andBites from Bon Temps. I’m putting that on my Christmas wish list.

Mad Men

You’re probably scratching your head. Don’t. This one is about drinking, beverages. You’re now probably thinking “but drink is not food”. Don’t split hairs. Food and drink are related; we orally consume and require both for survival (water anyway).

Image sourced from The Guardian

Don Draper and his cronies crack open the whisky and vodka bottles more often than people drink water. Difficult conversation? Pour a drink. Strategy planning session with the colleagues? Pour another one. Celebration? Go on a bender. Rough time at home the night before? Pour yourself a morning alcoholic pick-me-up. Any excuse or no excuse at all, these advertising suits are well accustomed to a stiff drink or nine. And make that a double, neat.

Authentic Happiness

Meditative March has made me all thoughtful and stuff. Less talk more action seems to be the motto. I've been busy socialising, cooking and living my life, too busy to be recording it all, which is starting to seem like such a ludicrous concept by the way.

I'm torn between two generations: X and Y. I  was born somewhere in between the two, either the end of X or the beginning of Y, no one is able to decide the exact dates that define the generations. Either way, I sway between the two like a fish being pulled by the tide. As much as I love technology I despise it. As much as I want to be connected I want to disappear.

Is there anybody out there? What is all this for? What's the purpose? The last is the biggest question.

What am I doing all this for? Who am I? Do I have to pick who I want to be? Who cares where I ate at on the weekend?

The last couple of weeks my writing has been inconsistent. I have a backlog of cafes I need to write the reviews for and photos to edit. That shit is weighing me down. When did it stop being fun and start being a drag?

It's Bourdain's fault, that rat bastard. He's got it made. I want what he's got. The traveling and the eating with a big slice of culture in his face.

It was a slow and steady culmination of doing Bourdain-a-thons (watching back to back episodes of No Reservations horizontally on my couch wearing nothing but a T-shirt and my underwear, eating my shitty food while he tasted exotic things and got sloshed), reading my signed copy of Kitchen Confidential and meeting the bastard. Add my constant slutting around Sydney cafes and restaurants the last two months and the last straw of the Taste of Sydney Festival. But what could all this mean?

I've got all Bourdain things that I love on one hand, then all Sydney things which I also (should) love in the other. Shouldn't they all harmonise? Something hasn't been sitting right deep down in my gut, it didn't make sense. Like eating a dodgy meal which is sure to cause you pain later, it festers and churns.

It's what I've been thinking and feeling ever since I stepped foot on this massive island of ours called Australia, 22 years ago. There is no culture. There is no history. So without these two elements, what story are we trying to tell? I knew it back then as an eight year old and I know it now even better.

Food is history, food is culture, it's who we are, where we came from and where we are going.

The only story Taste of Sydney explicitly told me is how to cash in, how to pose like a real Sydney-sider and how desperate we are for something more real and tangible, for something authentic. This is the same story I've been told consistently in every Sydney cafe or restaurant I've dined in. The superficial transactions speak for themselves.

Kooky decor or random tid-bits collected from someones trash can and back yard garage sale? Voila. We have a new theme for a cafe!

Sydney and in fact Australia is asking for anything as long as it has some sort of story or even abstract interest, just to get away from our every day monotony and instead get the opportunity to be sophisticated and cultured and shit.

That's why I'm over it. I've been trolling through the multitude of food blogs out there and every fucker and his dog is a food critic. But they're not telling me what I really want to hear.

I'm putting this down and hope that you pick it up: I'm not a food critic, I don't know the French names or techniques for food. That's what the chefs are for. I just know what I like and what resonates with me deep down in my soul.

Who I am is a Greek raised on farms and living the urban life for a while now. I'm a citizen of the world, taking in different cultures and wanting to find out more. I'm looking to make connections between how I was raised and what my culture and family is about, with how I live my life today. This is a declaration damn it. That's what I want to share with you reading this right now. I want to tell you my story and hopefully help you build your own.

Like any true philosophizing Greek and my forefathers before me, I want to know what the meaning is. I want to search the deep recesses and figure out how we got here in the first place.

I said Australia has no culture or history. The reality is, it has almost if not all the cultures in the world living under one roof. What an awesome collective?! It's evident in the faces of its inhabitants, in the cuisines they dish out and the themes and ideas they prop up. We are truly spoilt for choice and opportunity and perhaps smaller collectives like Melbourne and Adelaide are becoming so successful at it (the authentic food thing) because they are able to stay true to this vision of sharing their experiences authentically. Luckily Sydney is catching up, especially with cool and fun initiatives or groups like 6 Degrees of Preparation.

This is our time, where we the invaders bring our influences and traditions and create a mish-mash for this, our new world. It's us creating out own story. This is our time of making history or at least understanding it.

So this is my vow. No more boring posts of "this is a cafe I ate at and the service was good and the coffee tasty". Fuck that boring shit, let Simon Food Favorites wade through that dredge. It's time we took it up a notch and explored ideas and what that cafe really means, what lies underneath the surface, find out what the real story is. It's time to reinvent myself and this blog. Its time to start a conversation with some real people.

Existential crisis number two complete for this year and it's only March. Stay tuned.