LONDON NEWS

TUPNews recommends that you go ice-skating in Somerset House, on London’s the Strand.

I went on Monday and it was thoroughly sublime. Reading a nineteenth-century novel had put me in a nineteenth-century frame of mind, which was perfectly suited to the Dickensian tableaux of young, rosy-cheeked, rather posh gentlemen and ladies in long grey overcoats scraping about on the ice. The stately-home setting is perfect, and thankfully so was the weather – cold and dry, the very best London has to offer. Families brought young ones to the ice for the first time. Parliamentarians treated their staff to a few laps and some mulled wine. It was fantastic.

How can the sheer innocence not soften the hard-set urban jaw? How can the heart not melt to see the tall, soft-spoken West Indian ice marshal helping small children (and at one point, TUPNews) to their feet? How can the rustic cynic doubt that London is simply the best place to live in the whole wide world?

Women, of course, become totally divine on ice. Either stumbling helplessly, bringing out the primal stuff, or gracefully, artfully gliding around, stirring fantasies of cosy mountain living. The ice rink at Somerset House is a great place to fall in love.

This is the fiftieth and final post of the year. A happy holiday season to all of TUPNews’ readers! Thank you for your continued support.

BUSINESS NEWS

TUPNews recently lunched with the carbon boys at Barclays Capital in Canary Wharf, in-house mind. Not many banks do the in-house catering any more. The French banks tend to do it best, but the Barcap boys excelled themselves here.

More to the point, TUPNews noticed that a massive ticker has been slapped on the side of one of the Canary Wharf buildings – above the Corney & Barrow as you turn right out of the space-age tube station. It’s yellow on black, curves around the building and was running stock prices from the FTSE 100.

Tickers are fantastic. TUPNews recently visited Times Square in New York City, where there are tickers galore. Reuters, Bloomberg et al running news headlines, share prices, sports scores – all different colours and sizes. It’s particularly cool when two tickers stacked on top of each other run at different speeds – Bloomberg TV has this, for example. TUPNews feels a deep sense of serenity when watching these tickers, and I hope that Canary Wharf ends up covered in them.

The best thing about side-of-a-building tickers is that they are completely pointless. The chances of an outdoor ticker delivering critical information at a critical time are virtually nil – if it’s really important for you to keep track of real-time stock prices, you’re probably sitting on a trading floor rather than standing outside watching a ticker on the side of a building.

I can’t prove this, but I suspect that outdoor tickers are the finance community’s way of tacitly recognising that what they do has some aesthetic value, that it is sometimes strangely beautiful.

ENTERTAINMENT NEWS

The New York Times Magazine has just published its annual ideas issue, where it lists forty or so interesting ideas that have emerged over the last year. I have to admit it’s a little weaker than last year, but it’s still definitely worth a gander. TUPNews presents you with edited highlights for the Xmas dinner party season:

1. The Hypomanic American

This is a genetic theory of American exceptionalism, which posits that Yanks are the way they are – competitive, energetic, exuberant - because they are all relatively recently descended from immigrant stock. People who emigrate are genetically more inclined to be risk-takers (even when things get really awful in a country, only a small percentage emigrate), and that risk-taking gene (which transcends race) is why America is such a bastion of free market capitalism, dog-eat-dog, red-white-and-blue etc. etc.

2. The Fleeting Relationship

From the book “Together Alone: Personal Relationships in Public Places”. This is kind of rooted in the “we’re all atomised” theory, but it basically suggests that the fleeting encounters with colleagues, service industry employees and the geezer next to you on the terraces actually provide you with important emotional sustenance, and should be appreciated as such. In one sense, a statement of the obvious, but it’s an obvious thing worth stating.

3. The Laptop That Will Save The World

You might remember the wind-up radio that they invented for Africa (it’s cheap and it doesn’t need batteries). Now they’ve invented a wind-up laptop that costs about $100. It’s very basic, of course, but it should have African children learning important IT skills in no time, providing they don’t drop dead of starvation or malaria first. “It looks like you’re composing a desperate plea for famine relief. Would you like some help?”

And these excellent ideas don’t require explanation:

Monkey Pay-per-view
Robot Jockeys
Two-dimensional Food
Zombie Dogs

LONDON NEWS

The other day TUPNews saw an Arab woman near Bond Street Station wearing a Burberry hijab. YES!!

AMERICAS NEWS

The second thing that the Yanks are better at is lager. Not the watery piss that is exported over here, mind (although in fairness Bud Light et al don’t get a fair trial in the UK, where they are routinely served at a temperature several degrees warmer than their taste is designed for) – but the wide range of boutique microbrewery lagers available in supermarkets and off licences, or “liquor stores”.

These are basically the equivalent of England’s real ales. But whereas we British are generally happy to stick to crappy session lagers – that’s an industry term, by the way, devised by European brewers thinking, “how can we pervert centuries of brewing tradition to produce a watery, tasteless yet extremely alcoholic lager of which Brits will be able to down ten pints per session and still have room for a curry and a further five pints, i.e. how can we produce a lager designed to be drunk in sessions?” – Yanks have become a bit more demanding over the last twenty years. As a result, the casual lager-drinker is overwhelmed with choice.

Samuel Adams is probably the most famous example of the microbrewed beer – the Boston-based brewery (originally called the “Boston Beer Co.”) has been knocking out fine lagers since the 1820s, although it went bust in the 1970s, before the “better beer” movement led to an explosion of microbrewery beer, and a 1985 purchase by the Koch brewing family and rebranding to “Samuel Adams Boston Lager”, named for a Bostonian signatory of the Declaration of Independence. Sam Adams now sells dozens of varieties of beer, including stouts and cream ales, and the new “seasonal collection”, of which TUPNews sampled the “Winter Lager”.

TUPNews heartily endorses Samuel Adams’ fine products. My favourite Yank lager, however, is Yuengling Lager, America’s oldest beer. David Yuengling established the Eagle Brewery in 1829, in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. He later gave the beer his name. The brewery survived for a hundred and fifty years (including the Prohibition) by doggedly avoiding any growth of any kind – it was only when the current owner, a fifth-generation Yuengling, decided to capitalise on the 1990s “better beer” craze that Yuengling was sold outside of Pennsylvania. It’s now the fifth biggest brewer in the US, even though it is basically only available on the East Coast. It’s lovely.

The guy who owns Samuel Adams half-heartedly claims that Sam’s is the oldest brewer in America, as its precursor Boston Beer started brewing in 1828. But it shut down in the 1970s, so the chain is broken. He’s good friends with the Yuengling guy, so he’s basically just trying to wind him up.

The oldest beer in North America is in fact Canada’s Molson, established in 1786.

AMERICAS NEWS

TUPNews recently visited New Jersey, in the United States of America. The weather was cold but clear. I ate Thanksgiving dinner, watched American football and went to a Broadway musical.

There’s not much I can tell you about the United States of America that you don’t know already. In fact, it’s almost remarkable how well the stereotypes and clichés actually prepare you for a visit. America is generally rubbish, for reasons well documented elsewhere. There are two areas, however, where I must admit the Yanks have an edge.

The first is the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. TUPNews is a Tate member and a vociferous supporter of the Tate Modern in London, regarded by some as the foremost modern art gallery in the world. It wounds my sense of civic pride to report that the Museum of Modern Art in New York City first knocks the Tate Modern into a cocked hat, and secondly pisses on said hat from a distance of metres (yards). Yet this is the truth, so I must report it so.

An art critic would argue that MoMA’s permanent collection is simply better than the Tate Modern’s, and this is indeed so. You’ve got your Warhol soup cans, Jasper Johns flags, some actually famous Picassos as opposed to the handful of sketches at the Tate. Proper coffee table stuff.

TUPNews, however, was won over by the Architecture and Design collection on the second floor. This was basically a collection of design classics of the 20th and 21st centuries, with the general conceit being “look, you wouldn’t normally expect to see this in an art gallery, but if you think about it, it’s a design classic.” At times this conceit bordered on the cute, but of course this was always a risk. TUPNews loved it anyway. Here is a selection of items on display:

1. An Italian airport departures/arrivals board

One of the ones where the times and destinations change by small black panels flipping down, making that strangely soothing clicking noise

2. A single blade from a Boeing engine turbine

3. A Smart car

4. A Macintosh SE from 1984.

TUPNews had one of these as a boy. It still works perfectly, unlike TUPNews’ iBook which died after about four years, which is apparently completely par for the course these days.

5. The original iPod.

TUPNews owns one of these now. Seeing it behind glass was worse than when my old mobile phone was featured with a bag over its head in those “ashamed of your mobile” ads. Fellow art lovers laughed at me when I took it out of my pocket and held it up against the glass.

6. A Bic Cristal biro.

Or in fact, two, a red one and a blue one. This is where it came close to being a bit too cute, until you read the inscription and realise that the Bic Cristal’s hexagonal design has been the same since 1950. (The idea for a ballpoint pen was first conceived by Hungarian journalist Laszlo Biro in 1938, before Marcel Bich acquired the patent rights.) Also the inscription is hilarious –

Bic Cristal
Bic Corporation, France
Gift of the manufacturer

I would have liked to have attended the gift-giving ceremony.

As well as these gems there were Bauhaus prints, Soviet typography, 60s computers, Rennie Mackintosh posters, all manner of sublime shit. It was brilliant. Before coming I’d heard the line that MoMA was more stuffy and museum-like – the history of modern art – than the Tate’s freewheeling, thematic approach to hanging. But this was exactly the type of thing – gimmicky, but fun – that I’d like to see the Tate taking on.

In defence of the Tate Modern, it has had some very strong exhibitions, especially Cruel and Tender and that one with all the video work – with the Japanese women archers etc. MoMA’s exhibitions on the top floor were pretty weak (“Safe: Design Takes On Risk” promised much but was ultimately trying too hard to be clever, although the collection of Japanese flight safety information cards was pretty cool.) And of course, it’s worth noting that the Tate Modern is free, while entry to MoMA will set you back twenty American dollars.

I’ll tell you the second thing later today.