Pink Mousse, Yellow Cards and Feminism

After a long day at university, I have just eaten some of the windfall from a neighbourhood restaurant whose owners have gone on holiday, passed on to us by a second neighbour who can't possibly consume it all. Yesterday it was a slaw of cabbage, carrot, parsley, and fennel or celery stalk; tzatziki; and a dreamy cloud-like pink mousse which rumour declared contained a kind of fish and which most of us treated with respectful distance. Today it was a carton with a green bell pepper, eggplants and zucchinis, cucumbers, and a head of lettuce. So Mama sliced the eggplants and zucchinis, fried them in olive oil, and whoever wanted some had some.

Besides I have been able to try smoked almonds for the first time, thanks to our English aunt (as I like to think of her): the first three almonds are good; the fourth flips a switch where they become nearly irresistible.

***

À propos of nothing, the weather is kind of terrible. It is not uncommonly hot for this time of year — hardly impressive in fact in any way — but this degree of humidity drags one down like a gourmand albatross. Two days in a row one finds one's self covered in a fuzzy layer of moistness if one is cursed by the need to ride in the U-Bahn. (By 'one' I am obviously thinking of 'me.') I catnapped through much of the Latin lesson and admittedly found that it went by with rather enjoyable swiftness.

Over the weekend we had a lightning storm which raised the worry that someone somewhere in Berlin had offended God in a very thorough manner. I had managed to go to sleep by 2 a.m. perhaps when I was woken up by a series of tremendous tearing sounds from overhead which ripped away until they abruptly stopped, then there came great barely perceptible booms which echoed from the very foundations of the soil, and lightning so bright and so encompassing in its brightness that it was like daylight at dawn. There was torrential rain, too. I wasn't the only one who woke up in the family; the neighbours overhead were also thumping presumably to the window and back. It turns out (from the U-Bahn televisions' news on Monday), that there were 8000 lightning strikes and two fires — fortunately no injuries.

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As for the Euro Cup final, I hadn't thought much of Italy's team from what I'd heard of it. I detested it with a fiery hatred after the World Cup 2006 final because of the Zidane-Materazzi incident and because I had the impression that most of the team were cheats and that the team captain had a Mussoliniesque fascist air. During the World Cup in 2010 I repented because they mounted so much of an effort in their final game. Now Materazzi is nowhere to be seen, I have a good impression of the team generally, and rightly or wrongly I thought their game against Germany (which at first I was convinced they'd justly lose) showed skill and also a fairly clean way of playing.

During the World Cup 2012 I hated, instead, Spain's and the Netherlands' teams. I didn't think much of the players's personalities — though I made an exception for Spain's goalkeeper and the head coach — and the style of playing on both teams was a contrast to the fireworks of talent, inspiration, and 'soul' which were shown even by teams which didn't make it to the finals. I probably made clear which teams I liked at the time — for instance Uruguay and Chile, except for the latter's foul-spree tendencies. But Brazil's team, except if I am overidealizing it, was the most impressive. One did have the idea that it was a remnant of glory past. But first of all the greater heights of the players gave them a kind of dignified movement and loftiness. Secondly the attitude toward the game was so different: not the product of training regimens it seemed so much as of living the sport from a very early age, so that much of the technique was in fact second nature and not calculation, and it felt as if they were in their element and didn't really need a coach telling them what to do. This is where, though I've come to like Spain's team much better, I object to Spain and the Netherlands' team (though it appears to have changed a little) and to a lesser degree to the German team, which plays with conscientious strategy but tends in my view to falter if they are losing instead of rising to the challenge and battling as well they can.

This quality of courage, I think, characterized Italy's playing in this year's final. After Thiago Motta left the field, it did fizzle, but considering what they did since it was clear from the outset that Spain had the upper hand, I thought it was good. The fouls were not too bad, and the diving was less melodrama and more naturalism. As for Spain, I thought that the third goal was one of the most uninteresting ones I've seen in my life, and didn't know why the goalscorer looked so pleased until I read that he has won the Golden Boot.

So the game did make me grumpy, but when the tiny children of the soccer players came out onto the field, it defused my resentment a little. Besides the team which played better did win. I only wish it hadn't been darn Spain again.

***

Since I have no interest in Wimbledon, the Tour de France, or that costlier sport, the inquiry into the rate-fixing scandal, I have moved on to the haute couture week in Paris.

I said scathing things about Givenchy's collection the last time around (or the time before that?). But much to my surprise it did appear to catch on, and long, impractical gowns which are practically translucent except for strategically located stitching showed up on actresses at film premieres and so on. (At which point I will mention that I am glad that Katie Holmes is apparently casting off the fetters of Scientology forever.) This year I liked the collection better.

As for Raf Simons's Dior collection, it was more in the combined aesthetic of the early days and of John Galliano than I'd expected. I still pigeonhole the designer as a minimalist with a predilection for shapelessness and disagreeable colours — though, to be fair, some of the blues and reds in this Dior collection were lovely — probably unfairly. It irritates me a little that commentators on fashion are trying to pretend that Galliano's disagreeable views detract from the quality of his fashion; they do no such thing. You can't put in any designer, say 'He isn't anti-Semitic,' and expect him to come up with something wonderful and original based on that qualification — and maybe it is the very offensiveness with which Galliano could act which made him barrel ahead and produce the flamboyant things which made him a striking and not servilely conformist contributor to fashion weeks. That said, I am obviously not privy to the inner workings or finer points of the fashion world.

I remember Galliano's aesthetic generally, and though I don't think it's one of his most influential collections, I really liked the one he did which was inspired by flowers (and the models had upside-down cones of transparent plastic popped over their heads in homage to florists' wrappers). Having spent a great deal of time in our garden when we had one, it was a very nice experience to see how, in an alien but wonderfully observed way, the shapes and tinges and so on of the flora were being celebrated in cloth. It seemed clear that he and his design team loved flowers as much as I do.

***

Yesterday two classmates and I gave a presentation on black and Islamic feminism in the US. I concentrated on the second topic, and though it is very interesting, I think there is in fact a great deal more scholarship to be done. That said, the number of Muslim women in the US seem to number from 500,000 to 3.5 million (since the US Census is forbidden from asking about religion, the number of Muslims in the country is unknown except as extrapolated from surveys and so on), dispersed fairly widely around the states, so it isn't maybe a very visible group.

A theme I went into is that many of the restrictive practices attached to Islam are, in fact, practiced in specific sects and countries only, and secondly often arise from local cultural traditions rather than the Quran or even the core Sunni or Shi'a philosophies themselves.

Anyway, I had so many points that I had to stop maybe four-fifths of the way through; but I felt that it was good this way and that I didn't leave essential things out. But I mostly covered immigrant Muslim communities, left out the Nation of Islam and the hijab because these were covered in other presentations, and only had a short blurb about the Five Percent. And I still feel like talking on and on about what I found out during my research.