I Feel Love

Here's a very rough translation of his latest post (original here). Interesting stuff.

Proposal for change

You can't criticise the hierarchical list published by the British magazine Restaurants ("the best restaurant in the world") while at the same time permitting the rating of chefs by stars or marks out of 10, as in the Michelin Guide, for example.

Isn't it time that, as I suggested several years ago, we start distinguishing between artisans and artists? For artisans, the criteria are relatively simple, because they are technical in nature. If you ask an artisan for a tender, rare steak, you expect to get what you asked for. And since there are degrees of technical difficulty, we could rate artisans, and even establish a relationship between quality and price, by devising a kind of "technical grade" based on price.

On the other hand, when it comes to art, how can we say whether W.A. Mozart is better than J.S. Bach, if Flaubert is less good than Rabelais, if Picasso is better than Rembrandt? In artistic cuisine, the technique must obviously be flawless, as in painting: how can one hope to arouse a specific feeling if one can't hold a paintbrush, play the violin, or construct a sentence?

This being the case, how should we rate artists?

I propose that we fight against the idiotic ratings of Restaurant magazine, but I also demand that the Michelin Guide change its lazy habits: let us distinguish artisans and artists, and for artists, let us try to give readers of the guide an idea of the style that they might find in restaurants dedicated to artistic cuisine.

Please understand that I'm not militating on behalf of molecular cuisine, but simply so that culinary art (and not "the culinary arts": there is only one, the good one) might be recognised as it should be, in a more legible manner than yesterday and today.

This could be a winner...

My friend Hayden posted an absolutely wonderful list of his 100 favourite movies on Facebook. Unfortunately you can't read Facebook notes if you're not someone's friend, so I'm reposting it here - I'm sure he won't mind.

(Here's a bit of an advert by the way: if you have something you don't mind sharing with the whole world, rather than writing a Facebook note, post it on Posterous. It's really ridiculously easy, all you have to do is email it to post@posterous.com and hey presto you have a blog. It means you can share stuff with people who aren't your friends on Facebook. The nice thing is you can set it up so that it automatically posts to Facebook too!)

Anyway, here is Hayden's list. I've seen enough of these (about three quarters) to know that if you're looking for a really good movie to see you pretty much can't go wrong here:

3 Women (Altman, 1977)
8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)
The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959)
A Man Escaped (Bresson, 1957)
Amarcord (Fellini, 1973)
Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972)
Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson, 1966)
Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)
Badlands (Malick, 1973)
Band of Outsiders (Godard, 1964)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1965)
The Big Lebowski (Coen, 1998)
The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1946)
Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986)
Bob Le Flambeur (Melville, 1955)
Boudu Saved From Drowning (Renoir, 1932)
Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia (Peckinpah, 1974)
Burden of Dreams (Blank, 1982)
Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
Children of Men (Cuaron, 2006)
Cockfighter (Hellman, 1974)
Days of Heaven (Malick, 1978)
Dead Man (Jarmusch, 1995)
Deliverance (Boorman, 1972)
Diabolique (Clouzot, 1954)
Duck Soup (McCarey, 1933)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004)
F For Fake (Welles, 1976)
The General (Keaton, 1927)
Gerry (Van Sant, 2002)
Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai (Jarmusch, 2000)
The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)
The Godfather Part II (Coppola, 1974)
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (Leone, 1966)
Gosford Park (Altman, 2001)
The Grand Illusion (Renoir, 1938)
Grizzly Man (Herzog, 2005)
High and Low (Kurosawa, 1963)
His Girl Friday (Hawks, 1940)
Human Resources (Cantet, 1999)
Ikiru (Kurosawa, 1952)
I'm Not There (Haynes, 2007)
The Incredibles (Bird, 2004)
The Iron Giant (Bird, 1999)
Junior Bonner (Peckinpah, 1972)
Killer of Sheep (Burnett, 1977)
La Jetee (Marker, 1962)
L'Atalante (Vigo, 1934)
L'Avventura (Antonioni, 1960)
The Lady Eve (Sturges, 1941)
Little Dieter Needs To Fly (Herzog, 1997)
The Long Goodbye (Altman, 1973)
M (Lang, 1931)
The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (Ford, 1962)
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Weir, 2003)
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman, 1971)
Miller's Crossing (Coen, 1990)
Mon Oncle (Tati, 1958)
My Neighbor Totoro (Miyazaki, 1988)
The New World (Malick, 2005)
Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955)
No Country For Old Men (Coen, 2007)
Nosferatu (Murnau, 1929)
On the Waterfront (Kazan, 1954)
Once Upon A Time In the West (Leone, 1968)
Pennies From Heaven (Ross, 1981)
Pierrot Le Fou (Godard, 1965)
Playtime (Tati, 1967)
Princess Mononoke (Miyazaki, 1997)
Ran (Kurosawa, 1985)
Ratatouille (Bird, 2007)
Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954)
Ride The High Country (Peckinpah, 1962)
Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959)
Rivers and Tides (Riedelsheimer, 2001)
The Rules of the Game (Renoir, 1939)
Sans Soliel (Marker, 1983)
The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
The Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954)
Singin' In The Rain (Donen, 1952)
Spirited Away (Miyazaki, 2002)
Stagecoach (Ford, 1939)
The Straight Story (Lynch, 1999)
Straw Dogs (Peckinpah, 1971)
Sullivan's Travels (Sturges, 1942)
Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (Murnau, 1927)
Taxi Driver (Scorcese, 1976)
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Lang, 1933)
There Will Be Blood (Anderson, 2007)
Thieves Like Us (Altman, 1974)
The Third Man (Reed, 1949)
Touch of Evil (Welles, 1958)
Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman, 1971)
Unfaithfully Yours (Sturges, 1948)
Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
Week End (Godard, 1967)
The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969)
Yojimbo (Kurosawa, 1961)
Young Frankenstein (Brooks, 1974)

Incidentally, Hayden also wrote this contribution to the 33 1/3 series which I strongly suggest you buy!

By one of my heroes, David Crystal.

[Edit: note how much better this is than James Wood's crappy New Yorker piece, which unfortunately a lot more people will read.]