This variant of the original Russian salad is very popular in La Réunion. Cooking and eating it 9800km away from home is a good way for me to reduce homesickness.
Use as many potatoes, beetroots and onions as you like but you shouldn’t put too much garlic as the taste might become unpleasant.
Wash the potatoes and the beetroot after removing the latter’s leaves. Cook them in boiling water until they become softer (usually 15 to 20 minutes) and easy to peel, even by bare hands.
As you also need hard boiled eggs, you can add them to the water but don’t forget to remove them after ten minutes of cooking. Meanwhile, cut the onions into half or quarter rings and mince the garlic cloves.
Peel the potatoes and beetroot when they are ready, and cut them into rough dices. Mix them softly with the garlic and onions, then season with some balsamic vinegar. Add some mayonnaise and mix everything again. At this point you should remove excess liquid if there is any, so the potatoes won’t soften too much.
Finally, slice the hard boiled eggs and add them on top of the salad.
Last week-end, I took part in a Pokémon Tournament at the National Videogame Arcade. It was the first time I attended this kind of event as there aren’t many of those in La Réunion, if not any at all.
My first contact with the Pokémon universe was in 1999, when my parents bought me a VHS cassette of the cartoon series containing episodes 16, 17 and 19.
Later in the same year, I shared Pokémon Silver with my brother but I was begging for my own game because I didn’t like the player being named ‘BOSS’. So I got Pokémon Gold for Christmas, Pokémon Red a few years after and since then, one or both games of every generation when they came out.
I stopped watching the television series after season 4, as it was becoming so dumb it looked retarded even to the kid I still was. But the video games series never lost its original appeal and was genuinely renewed at every installment, to the chagrin of my parents.
All the Pokémon games of the main series are about a young boy or girl (you have the choice ‘only’ since Pokémon Crystal) who leaves his/her hometown to collect animal-like creatures called Pokémon and train them to fight other trainers’ Pokémon and ultimately defeat the Pokémon league to become a Pokémon master.
From time to time they also have to stop the local criminal organization or eco-terrorists who aim to seize control over Legendaries, very rare or sometimes unique and powerful Pokémon.
The scenario is no great shake and even if I’m still shivering when catching legendary Pokémon, the part I enjoy the most about the games is competitive battling.
There are currently 721 different species of Pokémon. And even within a same species, every Pokémon isn’t the same.
Their battle power is determined by six characteristics which are Health Points (HP), Attack (ATK), Defense (DEF), Special Attack (SpA), Special Defense (SpD) and Speed (SPE). HP are how much damage a Pokémon can take before fainting. ATK and SpA are respectively physical and special offensive power, counterbalanced by DEF and SpD. SPE basically determines which Pokémon attacks first.
Every Pokémon species comes with a fixed set of base stats range which are the same for all its members. Within this group, the difference between the individuals will be their Individual Values (IV), one for each before-mentioned characteristics. The higher the IVs are, the closer the Pokémon‘s stats will be from the base stats range limit, 31 IV being the maximum value and 0 IV the minimum.
On top of that, the Pokémon‘s stats can be slightly altered by their Nature. There are 25 of them and each one enhances a characteristic (excluding HP) while lowering another, with the exception of five natures that leave the stats unchanged. Individual Values and Natures are randomly set by the game for every Pokémon you encounter, which means competitive battles require a lot of time spent catching and breeding.
With that in mind, it makes 2 907 072 unique Pokémon from which you have to choose 6 to include to your team and train by raising their Effort Values (EV) and teaching them up to four moves (amongst a variety of more than 600).
To put it in a nutshell, Pokémon games battles are based on a combination of wisely chosen pieces and a lot of strategic thinking to adapt to the infinity of possibilities one can face. Even if some combinations are more common because they have proven to be more efficient, meeting other players and testing the Pokémon you raised yourself is always fun, and sometimes unexpected turnarounds can even happen.
If you want more information about Pokémon competitive battling, please visit this link: http://www.smogon.com/
Last week somebody told me he doesn’t understand art, to which I replied I don’t either. Now that I am thinking back, I realize I wasn’t totally kidding.
I have studied art for three years, got my bachelor’s degree and I am pursuing a two-years Master in Fine Arts. Yet, I still feel miserable when confronted with some works of art.
Two weeks ago, my colleagues and I went to Ikon Gallery in Birmingham where three artists were exhibiting: Takehisa Kosugi, Julie Brook and Vanley Burke. We were not told what the trip was about, so I didn’t have time to do any preliminary research about the exhibition – which I always do to pretend I know shit (just kidding, I’m the lazy type) –. To put it in a few words: I didn’t know anything.
Visiting an exhibition you know nothing about, especially in a city you just discovered is quite an exciting experience. But my excitement faded when I entered the first room.
There were pocket radios hanging from the ceiling, an electric fan in a corner of the room and another one on the opposite side. Two projections of water waves were partly overlapping on the wall. Apart from this installation, there were three or four socles with unclosed plastic containers on top of them. They all contained white powdery material, inter alia. Some people of our group played with and even tasted it until a staff member noticed and stopped them. I was about to do the same to be honest (playing with it, not stopping them) as the blinking LEDs hidden in the white sand looked like an inviting call to interaction.
I didn’t get it then, mostly because I was disappointed by the fact that I would have to make sense out of this collection of nonsense in order to appreciate it, but now that I have read a bit about Kosugi’s background (a pioneer of experimental music and somewhat related to John Cage), I can catch a glimpse of the meaning of Mono-dharma, electronic (1967): distant objects and entities like sound, wind, water or light, brought near by their connection to the wavelength phenomenon.
I skipped Brook’s work because I’m not sensitive to video art and the room was narrow and full. I went straight to At Home with Vanley Burke.
Burke’s exhibition was destabilizing for it was very immersive: we were literally invited to his home. The space was divided into actual rooms (the bathroom and the toilet were missing though) which were populated with personal belongings, including assorted objects, handcrafted tools and ornaments, photographs, a massive collection of aged vinyls, VHS and books etc.
The warmth, the music and the ambient cultural mixture (mostly from African roots) made me feel at home, but a decade backwards.
My reaction to the two artists’s works were radically different because one called for my intellect whereas the other called forth my sensitivity, but both required to invest my own experience as a human being whole: social background, tastes, personal history, culture, education, etc.
If I had been raised, say, in a Russian electronic laboratory, I might would have felt at home in Kosugi’s exhibition while Burke’s would have been more exotic to me.
I don’t think art is as elitist as many think it is. You don’t need an art degree or to have studied history of art to appreciate an artwork, as the very first step to understanding a piece of art is whether ‘Liking it’ or ‘Not liking it’. I’m not talking about judging exclusively its aesthetic (the debate about beauty in art is long outdated) but confronting it to your own sensibility and everything it includes.
No matter how deep and elaborate the artist’s reflection is, the material form it takes cannot escape this most basic form of judgment. But please remember there is an infinity of shades between “I like it” and “This is bullshit”.
Art is of course not just a question of taste and has to refer to something other than itself to exist, otherwise anything would be art (though anything could actually be art). But you don’t need to understand every single preoccupation that comes into play in every artwork to understand art, just as you don’t need to understand algebraic geometry to understand mathematics, even though you should at least know how much 1+1 is.
So, just as advanced mathematics require some time, interest and maybe a bit of studying, further comprehension of art requires some more commitment than ‘I like’ or ‘I dislike’. There seems to be a common belief that art is nothing more than mere distraction (and a leisure on the maker’s side), and the first thing that comes into most people’s mind when they think about art is The Mona Lisa hung on the wall of the Louvre’s galleries, or a reproduction of it in their doctor’s office. I think the reason is mainly classical painting and classical sculpture being objects of passive contemplation to the regular contemporary viewer, as they are mostly archives of distant contexts and preoccupations which are sometimes lost in the flow of time. Without a thick knowledge of history and history of art, the only thing that is left to be seen is the remarkable proficiency behind these artworks. Contemporary art on the other hand is present and questions the world we live in and the people we live with. It also inevitably inherits the questioning of traditional art which started a few decades ago (or a few centuries ago if we consider history of art as a continuity), giving artists potentially unlimited freedom, and giving art lovers some pain.
But art is not only “contemporary art” and includes countless variations, making it even more difficult to define. I tried to be as exhaustive as I could in this text but I had specific artworks in mind which may not be the same as yours, to which nothing I said may even apply.
Anyway, there is absolutely nothing wrong about not understanding an artwork, or should I say, not understanding an artwork in the way the artist originally intended it to be understood (is it even possible anyway?), unless you do it for a living or your only friends are art snobs. You don’t even need to care about any artist or any artwork at all, but maybe you should at least try, because life without art is sadder than Titanic‘s ending.
I was at the National Videogame Arcade on the 19th, as mentioned in the previous post.
We had two sunny and warm days in a row, but the nights are getting colder. This might be the last respite before the long way to winter and my first snow experience (can’t wait for it!).
Last week we worked on our studio space in the Bonington building (mostly painting the walls in white and moving furnitures around) but most of the time I’ll be spending there will be dedicated to pretending I am actually using the space, as my work requires at most my laptop, a pen and some paper. Moreover, working in pyjamas has proven to enhance my productivity somehow.
We went back to Primary, Backlit and One Thoresby (there was no free wine this time) and attended other exhibitions or art related event. The Collabor-8 event in Nottingham Contemporary on Saturday was dull, I had to say it. This week, an other meeting will be held at the National Videogame Arcade: Pokémon Battle Master Qualifier. I’m looking forward to it!
Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem. One of, if not the oldest inn in England.
I keep visiting Nottingham, discovering new places or noticing ones I didn’t during my previous walks. I’m becoming more familiar with the streets and tend to get lost less often.
Yet it doesn’t stop me from being late to school everyday, and the shortcut I found through Nottingham General Cemetery doesn’t reduce much of the thirty minutes walk from where I live.
This week we – the students of MA Fine Arts and MA Photography – went to Nottingham Contemporary where an exhibition by Pablo Bronstein was held: The Treasures of Chatsworth. We went to Birmingham a few days afterwards to visit another gallery, Ikon, where were hosted At Home with Vanley Burke, Pigment by Julie Brook and Spacings by Takehisa Kosugi.
Birmingham was a fun city to visit for it looked like a confused patchwork of various architectural styles. It’s good that it is less than 2 hours away from Nottingham by train because I would like to take more time to visit it in a couple of weeks.
Back in Nottingham, we went to the openings of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition in Primary, Backlit and One Thoresby Street. It was followed by an after party I didn’t attend, at Nottingham Contemporary.
