5. Experimental Cocktail Club

Chinatown: door after door of culinary Eastern promises, roast ducks spinning away in neon lit restaurant windows, and the annual colour-explosion of Chinese New Year - an incredible part of London’s cultural life, but not one I would go to expecting anything more than a belly full of tasty egg-fried rice. So when a friend told me to go to a bar, located at 13A Gerrard Street in the heart of Chinatown, I wasn’t that surprised to find that there was no visible bar anywhere along this road. To find the Experimental Cocktail Club, you need to pretend you’re in some kind of magical world. Somewhere between number 13 and 14 will appear to the very keen eye a small black door, the platform 9 and 3/4’s of cocktail magic. And my goodness, what a well-kept secret this world is. The ECC is a decadent melange of a 1920’s speakeasy and a cocktail bar straight out of elegant Mad Men Manhattan. It’s a three storey converted Victorian house, with a baroque-meets-bohemian décor and an elite (mostly French) clientele to match its flashy cocktail menu. The downstairs main bar is classic and regal, whilst upstairs is smaller, and more intimate, with a piano decorating it’s bar and Chinese style prints to complement its Chinatown location. The drinks are certainly not cheap, especially with the compulsory service charge added to each bar trip, but the cocktails definitely live up to the bar’s name. With ingredients such as smoked pineapple syrup and lavender-infused gin, you are guaranteed to find something to excite you. Owned by a French trio, who have a few very popular bars in Paris, this place is fairly new on the Soho scene, having opened only a few months ago. But judging from a packed Thursday night, it is doing very, very well. And why wouldn’t it? It is exactly what you want from a classy night out. Exclusive, but not pretentiously so, expensive but not unnecessarily so, and so very beautifully hidden, the ECC is one of London’s most brilliant little secrets.

http://experimentalcocktailclublondon.com/

4. Freud

Nestled at the end of Neal Street in the heart of Covent Garden, this cocktail bar and art gallery is almost invisible to the untrained eye. On first appearance it appears to be a dingy, dimly lit basement bar, but follow the rather dangerously steep metal staircase down and far from the seeming descent into hell, this is in fact the path to cocktail heaven. Scrawled on the chalk board behind the tiny bar are at least 100 cocktails, ranging from about £5 to £7.80. And every single penny you spend here is completely worth it. I have never had such a brilliant Bloody Mary, and even the more inventive cocktails make perfect taste sense. The decor and the people most certainly add to this fine concoction; The small space, which is rammed on a weekend, functions also as an art gallery, with eclectic paintings decorating the concrete, minimalist walls, and the skilled creators behind the bar are friendly, fast and, as a nice bonus, always rather good-looking. As a result, this place has rapidly become one of my fail-safe drinking dens, be it for a post-dinner drink, or a pre-clubbing few before hitting the nearby Soho. Be warned though: a friend of mine got the train home in the wrong direction after just two cocktails. Lethally strong and superbly tasty: I’m sure even Freud would approve.

3. Fernandez & Wells

Working just off Carnaby Street lately, a friend meeting me for lunch one day, introduced me to my new favourite place in London: Fernandez & Wells. With its wooden furnishings and its stripped down décor consisting of hams hanging from the ceiling, this cafe/winebar/eaterie has an amazingly rustic feel. Add to this the mounds of fresh, colourful sandwiches, and the rich smell of good coffee, and you feel like you’re in a farmer’s market in rural France, located in the middle of London town’s Soho. And just to make sure you don’t feel a bit too rural, it turns into a stylish wine bar in the evenings. Parfait.

http://www.fernandezandwells.com/index.php

Winter...

'Wearing three layers of coats and legwarmers, I see my own breath on the face of the door'

Changes

Do I dare 

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time 

For decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse

 

T.S. Eliot. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The “buts” and “ands” of being a feminist

“I’m not a feminist but…”: A frequent expression I hear, spoken from the mouths of even the most independent and socially and politically intelligent women. I have come to realise over the years that women today are often reluctant to embrace and identify with a term which has given them so much. What is wrong with being a feminist? Surely every woman today, having reaped the rewards of her suffragette sisters, should be happy and proud to call herself one of them? For me, “I'm not a feminist but I believe that women should have equal pay” is an oxymoron. If you believe in any ounce of female empowerment, or even live a life which allows you to have it, you are automatically a feminist. And that is not a negative thing.

I much prefer the phrase “I am a feminist and…” I used it just the other day, when inputting some information onto the computer at work I was shocked to find a certain omission from a drop-down list of titles. Mr, Mrs, Miss and various combinations such as Mr and Mrs, Dr and Dr, were all there. The Dr and Mr combination was, however, absent. It is apparently impossible for a woman to have the title Dr, whilst her husband does not. So, I rang up the software creators and proudly used the phrase “I am a feminist and…”

I was surprised, therefore, when I found myself using a phrase which combines both the “but” and the “and” feminist phrases: “I am a feminist but…”. I came across a facebook group against Transport for London’s new posters which try to raise awareness of the dangers of taking unbooked cabs. The group claims that the posters are victim blaming women. According to the creators, the phrase “you’re putting yourself  in danger”, suggests that women are to blame for rape, and that the poster as a whole says that  “women are not entitled to be in public places without the threat violence”.

The poster is certainly shocking. And as the group claims, it probably triggers awful memories for sexual assault victims through the suggestion that the woman depicted is being raped. However, the group takes its attack on the posters too far. It moves on from critiquing the poster for what it is in itself, to slandering it because it is sponsored by the City of London Police who fail to respond to rape effectively and who should therefore not be trusted with giving safety advice to women.

Now, I am a feminist but such slandering of a poster that is raising awareness of real dangers for women, is completely ridiculous. Surely the positive effects of such a poster far outweigh any negative suggestions which it may, supposedly, imply. If anything, the fact that the poster addresses the woman, making it her responsibility, is an empowering thing: You’re safety is in you’re hands, and there are certain decisions which you can make that enable it to stay there. The dangers of unbooked cabs are a very real threat, and the truth of the matter is that women can make certain choices which lessen this threat. Using this, as an attack on the police for not taking rape cases seriously, even though this may be true, is completely unnecessary and counter-productive.

Of course, no movement in history, no attempt for equality got anywhere by being practical and letting certain slip-ups go unnoticed for the sake of the greater good. Naturally, if you’re in a minority, fighting for a cause, you have to push to extremes to be heard. But I think that it is this part of feminism today which makes women reluctant to identify with the term. People see feminist campaigns such as this, which seem so extreme and counter-productive, and automatically, being a feminist becomes associated with impracticality, extremism and over-analytical ridiculousness. And women today see it as that, instead of as what it genuinely and very simply boils down to: believing in women’s rights, empowerment and equality and being able to say it unashamedly and proudly: “I am a feminist”.

who needs syntax

e.e cummings is a strong candidate for the category of “pretentious poet”. Rarely does his poetry follow the pattern for even the most basic structures of our language; a cummings poem makes reading a vertical as opposed to horizontal process, and even his chosen spelling of his name screams self-important, over-analytical and pretentious. Primarily, his poetry is a pain to read. It is a process of putting words together yourself, deciding which word makes most sense with what the poem is attempting, somewhat tortuously, to talk about. And yet, somehow, brilliantly, cummings makes it work.

cummings was the non-modernist poet writing in the modernist time. Whilst artists of the post-war era were fixated on using poetry as a medium to create and find meaning and structure in a dilapidated world, cummings was stripping all that apart, destroying the most basic and seemingly immoveable force of our existence, language, through warping and twisting its most basic rules and patterns. Words are not supposed to be cut across two lines, separated by paragraphs or interrupted by jarring open-ended brackets. So why create such chaos in an already chaotic world? cummings is, cleverly, proposing an alternative solution to the innate rootlessness of a post-war society. By breaking down the last of the human certainties, he forces people to look towards another human certainty and find a purpose in this – emotion. If we have nothing left to root us and structure us, the only thing we have left to know is what we feel.

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all the flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

and death i think is no parenthesis

For cummings, it is in feeling that we will find life’s meaning; And poetry is the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” (Wordsworth), the closest, most direct artistic communication of this overarching human capability. cummings’ work is rooted in this reality, the reality of emotion and human susceptibility to it. Pretentious? Or real, positive and innately, painfully human?