Pills and thrills

With its heady cocktail of white-hot celebrity, fashionable food and Damien Hirst art, it was Cool Britannia's canteen. But when the feeding frenzy was over, Pharmacy could not be saved. Now, as Sotheby's prepares a multi-million sell-off of its fixtures and fittings, Anthony Haden-Guest charts the rise and fall of the restaurant that defined a decade.

Enfants maudits

When Daniel Rouxel was a small boy growing up in the Breton village of Megrit in the early 1950s, he remembers the mayor making him stand up in front of the parishioners outside church one Sunday.

"Which one of you knows the difference between a swallow and a Boche?" the mayor asked.

The author hopes to encourage people to trace their fathers

"I'll tell you. When the swallow makes its babies here in France, it takes them with it when it leaves. But the Boche - he leaves his behind."

Rouxel was, not surprisingly, mortified. He was the baby the Boche had left behind.

"After that, I wept and wept," he says today. "I was so ashamed that I ran and hid under a bridge for the whole night. I even thought of doing away with myself."

Rouxel's account appears in a book just published in France - coincidentally or not, just before the 60th anniversary of the liberation. It finally addresses one of the country's last remaining wartime taboos.

"Enfants maudits" - or "Accursed Children" - collects in print, for the first time, memories of the tens of thousands of so-called "Bastards of the Boche", the illegitimate offspring of liaisons between French women and occupying German troops.

Picaper says the aim of the book is to encourage more of the 200,000 to emerge from the shadows, and in each copy is included a form which can be sent to the Wehrmacht archives.

Anni-Frid Lyngstad's biography

Anni-Frid Synni Lyngstad, better known simply as Frida, was born November 15, 1945 in Ballangen outside of Narvik, Norway. Her father was Alfred Haase, a German soldier, while her mother, Synni Lyngstad, was a Norwegian teenage girl. Frida’s father left Norway before Frida was born, and was thought to have vanished when his ship was sunk on the way back to Germany.

Oil bath

Assuming the Profit Position

"Yoga is not a mass practice," says Deborah Willoughby, founding editor of Yoga International magazine. "It is a direct transmission from teacher to student. And asana [the physical practice] is only one part of it."

"Yoga is a lot about the teacher-student relationship," he says. "When you are a big business and a big corporation, a lot of times the bottom line is drawn above the heart."

"Yoga is an evolving, changing science," he says. "I think it will grow into something far beyond anything we can envision. We are in the caterpillar stage, and we have a butterfly growing. I'm sure Yoga Works thinks they are the butterfly. But we don't know that yet."

Ideas

I have an idea and I'm going to draw a line around it.

Local colour: The natural colour you find in an object.
Arbitrary colour: The colour an artist chooses to use to colour an object.

How does point of view create emotional responses?

People as staffage: taking up space in the image, but only for presentation purposes.

It's amazing what a coffee break can do.

Just to catch up on this week's events, the first docent meeting of the fall season was on Tuesday. Great cookies btw. We will be touring an exciting new exhibit, Massive Change, curated by Bruce Mau. I was going to bow out this fall, and focus on work, but I really don't want to miss out on this one. The training alone will be incredible, the focus on new design will be invaluable. Next week we will start meeting with the team that brought the exhibit together.

We also had another tour around the Emily Carr exhibit with the curator from Surrey Art Gallery. I am still in love with Carr's work, her departure into the forest is just lovely. The way she approaches the tree definately echoes the work of Lauren Harris, but there is an immensity, I think that she gets from her cubist studies, the size and shape of the trees, the intensity of color, a sort of billowing comfort that you feel when you look at her forests. I am interested in finding this book, by Ralph Pearson, How to See Modern Pictures, as this informed the way she shaped her paintings.

Hoberman Sphere

You know, when you are working on something, and you think it is going so well, and then you show it to someone, and there are all these changes and more complicated things you need to do ...

Okay, so I had a breakdown. Yep, full on. Why? Because I want to be finished. I want to move on to the next thing. I want to know it all already. I want it to be easy.

I had no idea that I am so resistant to real challenges. I had no idea my expectations are so rigid. I set these deadlines for myself, which are not realistic, and then get upset when I can't live up to it. And then I am hard on myself.

Deep breath, more learning.

It is true, epsom salts work. My cold is not gone, but it has progressed quickly after yesterday's soak. Praise be!

I vow not to forget this knowledge ... in fact, I vow to soak at least once a week in salt water. I have also been enjoying the ritual of the sauna. There is a a good one at the community center by the lake, and I swear, no one else uses it. Such bliss, to be heated to boiling from top to toe, and then to shower in the coldest spray I can stand. Sometimes all I can do is hold one limb at a time under the spray, the deep cold reaches inside. Then back to the heat, to uncurl again. This does amazing things for the circulation, not to mention the skin. Squeaky clean and refreshed.

I find different ways to take care of myself, and I treasure each discovery.

Okay, so where the hell have I been? The summer has sighed into fall's wheezy breezes, and as we overcome the latest cold, dripping crackling snuffling, we awaken to a new fall season at the gallery. New exhibits to tour, new words to read, new things to think about and present in some sort of coherence to young minds. And here I am, caught without a tool to notate my process, caught scrambling ...

So, word on the street is that a new router is in order for this blog to continue with Blogger at home on our trusty server. Active vs passive ftp. My inner luddite shrugs her shoulders and wishes the technology bugs would just work their own way out, but we know this attitude will take us nowhere. In the meantime, we will take advantage of Blogspot. I have looked at other tools, and I can't bear to change my blogwear. A creature of habit, of course!

But let's get back to the cold for a moment. I think I was almost insane last night, squeaking in a tiny voice, my throat burning, tearing eyes, sinuses on fire. My throat, btw, feels like it has two large peeled grapes in the place where my tonsils used to be. Ick. So I had a hot bath with epsom salts this eve, and a dash of juniper foam bath. I do feel better, and I hope that I will be able to resume my normal routine tomorrow. It is the first class of the yoga programme I signed up for, and I do want to attend.