Latest news with #Muses
Sydney Morning Herald
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
An ex-Kafeneion staffer heads up this Greek wine bar with a meze-heavy menu in Fitzroy North
Previous SlideNext Slide Greek$$$$ Greek restaurant Kafeneion 's former venue manager Yianni Malindretos has struck out on his own, opening wine bar Muses where beloved bistro previously Pinotta stood. It's a hard act to follow, but Malindretos hopes to fill the void with a laidback venue that locals can use as they please, from spontaneous drinks (raki-spiked cocktail, anyone?) to feasts influenced by his Cretan heritage. The meze-heavy menu includes taramasalata, spanakopita, soutzoukakia (baked meatballs), and sesame seed-crusted slabs of feta, served molten with Cretan honey. Youvarlakia avgolemono is a lemony Greek meatball soup. A baklava-tiramisu hybrid – the best parts of both desserts in a nest of kataifi pastry – is 'what 90 per cent of diners want to try, even if they're full,' Malindretos says.
The Age
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
An ex-Kafeneion staffer heads up this Greek wine bar with a meze-heavy menu in Fitzroy North
Previous SlideNext Slide Greek$$$$ Greek restaurant Kafeneion 's former venue manager Yianni Malindretos has struck out on his own, opening wine bar Muses where beloved bistro previously Pinotta stood. It's a hard act to follow, but Malindretos hopes to fill the void with a laidback venue that locals can use as they please, from spontaneous drinks (raki-spiked cocktail, anyone?) to feasts influenced by his Cretan heritage. The meze-heavy menu includes taramasalata, spanakopita, soutzoukakia (baked meatballs), and sesame seed-crusted slabs of feta, served molten with Cretan honey. Youvarlakia avgolemono is a lemony Greek meatball soup. A baklava-tiramisu hybrid – the best parts of both desserts in a nest of kataifi pastry – is 'what 90 per cent of diners want to try, even if they're full,' Malindretos says.
Daily Mail
09-07-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
JOHN MACLEOD: Hairy and dishevelled, bopping along as if sozzled...but hum of the bumblebee is truly the voice of our gardens
'The hum of bees is the voice of the garden,' mused the late Elizabeth Lawrence, internationally known garden writer – and she spoke not of the industrious, humourless honey-bee, merely a unit in in a hive of fantastically ordered complexity and its one loyalty to the Reich. She meant the bumblebee, meandering gently about, never in a rush, loath to sting. Hairy and dishevelled, it bounces off windows and bops, as if a little sozzled, amidst delphiniums and buddleia and honeysuckle and the bonny purple heather. The Victorians rather sweetly called them 'humblebees.' In Old English, they were 'dumbledores' – yes, that's where she got it – and the Romans thought them creatures of the Muses. To our Celtic forebears, they were messages from the heavens. And, even today, some superstitions endure. A bumblebee flying into your house, they do say, heralds some important, forthcoming visitor. They portend luck and sweetness; a bumblebee landing on your hand declares that you are about to come into money. And, chilled and ponderous as a bumblebee might seem – less the maniacal jiving of the honeybee advising the hive of abundant good things at such-and-such a location than embarrassing Dad-dancing at a wedding – it is supremely efficient. Its four wings beat two hundred times a second; it thunders like an exquisitely tuned guitar-string – and it is the only living thing capable of pollinating a tomato plant. Accordingly, great commercial growers important thousands of boxes of bumblebees each year, sourced largely from France and Belgium and where they are commercially farmed, for their glasshouses. Bumblebees do not make honey: they do not need to, for a colony lasts but one long summer. Only the fattest hibernating queens, holed up in some crevice, survive winter – and her first mission, understandably, is to feed. Duly regaled with nectar from the first spring flowers, and protein-rich pollen from catkins and fluffy pussywillow, she then seeks out some des res – most species like to repurpose a fieldmouse's burrow – moulds some waxy cups, stores therein garnered nectar and pollen-balls, and lays her first eggs. Larvae duly pupbate and, just like that, she now commands a troop of workers – all girls; and the only thing that might go amiss is the invasion of a queen of some cuckoo bumblebee species, who usually kills (or, in rare mercy, enslaves) the original queen. What no queen will tolerate is a worker laying her own eggs. Her Majesty, naturally hurt as well as cross, promptly eats them. It is in only late summer, and doubtless with a world-weary sigh, that boys are begotten: lazy, laddish and stingless and only the luckiest getting to mate. 'He does nothing except stay out all night,' darkly confides Gill Perkins of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, 'get drunk on nectar and look for sex.' It might as well be a hall of residence. There are only seven relatively common species of bumblebee you are likely to see in Britain, and the biggest, the Great Yellow Bumblebee – 'like big, fat flying ping-pong balls,' enthuses Mrs Perkins – is now confined to the far north. Caithness, Sutherland, Orkney – and the Western Isles where, too, we can boast a unique bumblebee sub-species. A small heath bumblebee, bombus jonellus var. hebridensis. All told, though, there are twenty-four species in this country, as the late and peerless Bernard Levin enthused in a column published, rather sweetly, on 9 July 1975 – a precise half-century ago. He had just read Dr D V Alford's definitive work on the subject, published by Davis-Poynter for the eyewatering price, at that time, of £25, and imaginatively entitled Bumblebees. 'They go by names of such variegated magnificence,' panted Levin, 'such exquisitely poetic beauty, that I must introduce you to a selection. 'There is bombus agrorum, for instance, who is obviously a rustic bumblebee, forever sucking straws and leaning over gates; there is bombus americanorum, who, no doubt, chews gum; bombus distinguendus, who comes of a very old family of bumblebees, and bombus elegans, who only goes to the best tailors. 'Bombus frigidus, a very reserved bumblebee; bombus hortorum hortorum, who stammers; bombus inexpectatus, who is apt to pop out from behind lampposts and cry 'Boo!'; bombus senilis, poor old thing… 'And bombus virginalis, or so she says.' But all is not well for bumblebees. 2024 was the worst year for their numbers in Britain since records began. A big factor, of course, was its extraordinarily bad spring, with – according to the Meteorological Office – many areas receiving more than double, and in some places triple, the usual amount of rainfall for March, April and May. Untold, emerging queens were chilled, starved and clobbered just at the frailest point of bumblebee life – when a season's new colonies are being established by assorted single mums. Though conditions improved, even July and August saw their second-worst counts since Bumblebee Conservation Trust monitoring began. 'We've got smaller, weaker populations of a lot of these bumblebees,' says Dr Richard Comont, 'because of long-term habitat changes. We know that bumblebees were struggling anyway and smaller, weaker populations are less able to respond to changes: they don't have that resilience. 'Although there's loads of bumblebees in midsummer, they all come from very small numbers that emerge from hibernation in the spring.' Protracted heatwaves – remember the scorcher that was 2022, so protracted that in many districts it triggered a 'false autumn'? – also jeopardise bumblebee colonies. Queens and workers routinely 'thermoregulate,' fanning eggs and larvae when things hot up, but if the thermometer hits 35 degrees or more then all is lost. For almost the greatest paradox of bumblebees is that they are creatures of temperate climes, not tropical - at their most abundant in territory like the Alps and Britain and the cool summers of the Outer Hebrides. There are even some that live in the Arctic, like bombus polaris. ('Said to have nuclear mandibles,' purred Bernard Levin.) But still greater threats are neonicotinoid pesticides – which dramatically reduce a queen's egg-laying success – and even a 26% fall is enough, in many instances, for local extinction. Climate change and heavy metal pollution, as we reported yesterday, are even affecting how bumblebees hum, according to experts – and humming is vital in teasing such flowers as the tomato to open up for a visit. The simple destruction of habitat, though, long predates such toxins. Since 1950 we have lost, incredibly, 97% of Britain's wildflower meadows – largely due to modern intensified farming – and with dire ecological consequence. One reason that bumblebees still prosper in the Western Isles is because of the lowkey crofting agriculture – Hebrideans do not scamper around spraying things – and because of the fabled machair, the rich coastal shell-sand grazings which, at this season, are a riot of sweet, scented, blossom. I fully understand why neighbours mow their lawns, but wince when they go above and beyond and strim the roadside verges too. And when, several months ago, the northern verge the length of my street was churned up by BT – laying the kit for high-speed broadband – I quietly ordered in some wildflower seed and did much discreet evening sowing. Poppy, cornflower, yellow rattle, ox-eye daisy and so on. A summer without bumblebees is, for me, unthinkable. And, as French mathematician André Sainte-Laguë once joyously reflected, 'According to aerodynamic laws, the bumblebee cannot fly. Its bodyweight is not the right proportion to its wingspan. 'Ignoring these laws, the bee flies anyway.'
Time of India
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Murzban Shroff Captures Mumbai's Soul Through Stories
Excerpts here: Q. Everyone may say there are classic ways of writing a story, but everyone brings their uniqueness to the table, wouldn't you say? A. Whenever I begin a new book or project, I start with two basic questions: What do I have to say that's any different? And why do you need a book like this? Similarly, with Muses of Mumbai, I began by exploring certain key questions about the city. Going back a bit, when I was working on Breathless in Bombay, my feelings towards the city were quite ambivalent. With Breathless, my focus was on understanding the have-nots of the city, delving into migrant communities, and trying to sensitise the haves to the struggles of the have-nots. But with Muses, I found myself directly engaging with deeper questions. I wanted to explore how serious the vegetarian and non-vegetarian divide really is, whether the rich in Mumbai are any less vulnerable than the poor, and whether all gurus and godmen are conmen. I was also interested in how newly arrived migrants navigate the city and what specific challenges they face. These were the kinds of questions that shaped Muses of Mumbai and inspired many of the stories in the collection. Q. There's a sense that the stories leapt out at the author—perhaps from a newspaper clipping or from something overheard while walking through the city. How did this book come about? A. Not so much newspaper clippings. But it's interesting because let me give you an example. In my first book, while working with migrant communities, I had written a story on the Dhobi Ghats where I anticipated that builders might eye the ghats for development. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Kostenlose Casinospiele in Chemnitz [Jetzt spielen] Merkur24 Jetzt spielen Undo Two years after the story was published in the US, the Mumbai Mirror broke a front-page story confirming just that. I believe literature—and writers in particular—often have an underlying objective: to anticipate where the environment is headed. In that sense, there's almost a kind of clairvoyance involved. And how does that come about? Simply by being a flâneur, as you rightly observed. Yes, I write a lot from observation and detail—but not superficial detail. It's not there just for environmental precision. It's detail that creates immediacy, wraps itself around the reader, and feeds into the vision I'm trying to convey. For instance, in Muses of Mumbai, there's a story called 'Neighbours'. I was walking through a part of old Bombay with strong community feeling—where vendors knew each other—and suddenly I entered a stretch gripped by chaotic development. I call it the contrast between Bombay Bahami and Mumbai Mayhem. That kind of insight only comes when you're walking the city like a flâneur, with antennas up and eyes at the back of your head, constantly absorbing and sensing where the city is headed. Q. You make the reader look more closely than they otherwise would. Would you say that's what allows fiction to anticipate reality in ways journalism sometimes can't? A. Oh, absolutely. To understand this aspect of my writing, I think one must first understand why I'm here—what my role is, how I see myself as a writer. I don't work out of plot. For me, life itself is the plot. Just following life as a plot works beautifully for me. To expand on that, I work with characters and I work with issues. I get fascinated by certain character types and try to understand how the city shapes them. At the same time, I focus on issues. So, what are some of the issues I've explored in Muses of Mumbai? So I start with the vegetarian–non-vegetarian divide, then move on to alcoholism, terrorism, corruption, civic apathy, corporate greed and apathy, communal and caste prejudices, the usurpation of green zones, and the destruction of green cover. Lastly, I talk about the conspiracies behind urban development. But my real epiphany is: what does all this do to us as individuals? What does it do to us as human beings? How does it affect our relationship with the city? My writing is social realism in fictional form. It has a strong non-fiction base. I use that foundation to establish a leap of faith—with either the characters or the issues—and then take a leap of imagination to bring in the fictional elements, making the story more human and relatable. It's reality-based writing—what I call storytelling that grinds its way to a deeper reality. Q. Would you ever explore a short story that isn't grounded in non-fiction or reality? Would you be able to write something completely imaginative? A. Oh, absolutely. There are two kinds of writing I do—one within my milieu and one outside of it. By 'within my milieu,' I mean writing rooted in my environment—Mumbai or even pan-India, especially when exploring cultural issues. 'Outside my milieu' refers to the lives of the invisible—the migrants, the homeless. Then there's another kind of writing I do: work that's close to the bone, close to home. By that, I mean deep psychological excavations into human nature. You'll be seeing more of that soon. I attempted it in my novel Waiting for Jonathan Koshy, where I explored the lives of four friends engaged in alternate thinking. That novel wasn't research-heavy; it was drawn from material close to home. In it, I dealt with two central questions: How do you define success? And what's the difference between success and gratification? India is in the throes of commercialism and a transitional economy, and those questions felt urgent. Q. What is it about the short story form that appeals to you? A. I reserve the short story form mostly for my issue-based fiction because, when covering a territory like Mumbai, it's difficult to weave everything into a single overarching theme. Mumbai works best as a polyphony of class and cultures. There are multiple issues operating at multiple levels, and the short story allows me to represent that diversity more effectively. To expand on that—Muses of Mumbai has 17 stories, two of which are almost novelettes, around 15,000 to 17,000 words. Each story is completely different, not just in subject, characters, and socio-economic backgrounds, but also in writing style. Some use elements of memoir, some essay, some whimsy. The styles themselves reflect the city's diversity. That's why I find the short story form so powerful. It's a wonderfully promiscuous form of writing—you can explore a situation, a cameo, a predicament. A short story can raise questions and be deeply introspective, unlike the novel, which often feels the need to resolve itself. Q. You don't think a short story needs to resolve itself—it can just hang? A. Well, if you look at the Chekhovian model or the modern short story format, the short story often aims to raise questions and encourage introspection more than entertain. An analogy I use is that a short story is like an affair—you're on someone else's time, so you must deliver quickly, and it's open-ended. A novel, on the other hand, is like a marriage—there are good parts and bad parts, but you stay with it. Q. In your opinion, what defines a good short story? A. I think a good short story has to be taut, with a certain compact elegance. It needs a strong narrative pace and must take the reader on a journey of the soul. It should unfold truths that might otherwise go unnoticed and single-mindedly pursue a line of questioning or introspection. There has to be growth by the end—some form of cerebral or emotional shift. At the very least, it should get the reader thinking. Let me give you a couple of examples. Alice Munro's The Bear Came Over the Mountain is a beautiful story about an elderly couple where the wife develops Alzheimer's and falls in love with another patient in the care home. Her husband, while grappling with his own emotional journey, ultimately accepts her reality with grace and generosity. The story ends with a sense of growth and dignity—showing that such largeness of spirit is possible. Another example is Chekhov's The Chorus Girl, where a woman confronts a sex worker involved with her husband. Chekhov builds deep pathos for the sex worker, who tries to redeem herself in the eyes of the wife. That's what a good short story does—it deepens your understanding of human nature. Q. Who are the short story writers you admire? A. I like Jennifer Egan, Ben Fountain, and Richard Yates. But my reading ethic is a bit different—if I take to a writer, it doesn't matter whether they've written a novel or a short story collection. What matters is that the writer fuels my own growth and reading repertoire. I'm a voracious reader. Writers I enjoy include Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, DH Lawrence, Chekhov, Dostoevsky—I love the Russians. Among the French, I admire Flaubert, Michel Houellebecq, and of course Camus. Richard Yates has become a recent favourite, and when I discover writers like these, I make it a point to read all their work. I also do a lot of rereading, because once I embrace a writer, I know they're there to stay. Among contemporary writers, I admire Edward P Jones, Ben Fountain, Jennifer Egan, and Robert Olen Butler. Among Indian writers, I enjoy Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry, and Salman Rushdie. Q. What is it about the short story—compared to the novel—that appeals to you, and which writing style do you prefer? A. With a short story, you can tackle a cameo, an incident, an episode, or a character crisis. But with a novel, you create an entire universe. It's not that I start with a predetermined form. The subject matter often dictates the form. Mumbai, with its many layers, lent itself beautifully to the short story. Similarly, in my India collection Third Eye Rising, I explored issues like caste, dowry, child apathy, and female exploitation—drawn from experiences in tribal and rural India. There again, I was working with issues, so the short story format suited the material. I was trying to understand the two great institutions that bind India—family and spirituality. For my novel, I wanted to create a universe. I set it in the late '80s and early '90s, an era of independent and alternate thought. The novel follows five friends from different communities, united by their love for books, films, and ideas, reflecting a moment of national unity and intellectual freedom. That vision required the length and depth of a novel. So for me, it's always the vision that determines the form. Every story or idea presents itself in an embryonic form—a vision or a character's dilemma. That vision has its own trajectory, and at some point, the character begins to reveal whether it's a long marathon—a novel—or a brisk walk—a short story. Q. You had to go through three years of court cases. How did that experience impact your writing afterward? A. It was certainly a dark phase in my life. I was completely unprepared for it and realised early on that it was politically manufactured. I lost three years—wasted time, resources, and a huge drain on my energy. I was completely derailed from the project I was working on. To answer your question—how did it affect my writing? Was there any self-censorship? Actually, the opposite happened. I decided that if I could be sued for no fault of mine and my life could be turned upside down, then I might as well write exactly what I want, the way I want. That's why I wrote Waiting for Jonathan Koshy. It was a satirical work on what India was becoming, and through the novel I could say things I wanted to say. It actually emboldened me. I found my voice, I found my turf, and I decided—I'm going in guns blazing.
Time Out
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Hercules
One of theatre's greatest mysteries is how Disney literally made the most successful musical of all time and then proceeded to learn absolutely nothing from it. Virtuoso director Julie Taymor included all the dumb stuff required by the Mouse in her version of The Lion King – farting warthogs, basically – but nonetheless crafted an audacious and iconic production that departed radically from the aesthetic of the film and is still in theatres today. Subsequent Disney musicals like Aladdin and Frozen aren't bad, but they take zero risks – effectively just plonking the film onstage – and are not in theatres today. And here comes Hercules, the next in the megacorp's long line of perfectly adequate, not very imaginative adaptations of its bountiful '90s animated roster. Book of Mormon director Casey Nicholaw's production is good looking and high energy. Robert Horn and Kwame Kwei-Armah's book is appropriately big hearted with a handful of very funny gags. The show's not-so-secret weapon is the retention of the film's sassy quintet of singing Muses. Here turbocharged into a full-on gospel group, they're a whole lot of finger snapping, head shaking, quick-changing fun, and also add a note of character to Alan Menken's likeable but unremarkable Alan Menken-style score. Hercules is a unit of generic Disney stage entertainment However, the Muses are also symptomatic of the fact that the show's Ancient Greece comes across as a reskinned small-town America, without having any comment to make on small-town America. Everyone has American accents, and does American things: the notoriously vindictive goddess Hera is reimagined as a twinkly-eyed all-American mom. While there's a vague nod to Hellenistic art, there were endless opportunities to have done something visually audacious and aesthetically interesting, and they were all passed upon. Sure, The Lion King does insist on the accents, but Taymor's production is pointedly steeped in vivid pan-African aesthetics. Here, Dane Laffrey's sets and George Reeves's video design are often impressive, but they never don't look like a themed restaurant (to be fair, one scene is actually set in a themed restaurant). All that accepted, it's a sturdy action-adventure romp that absolutely does the trick and is eminently worth taking The Kids to during the hols. It begins when Hercules is born to chief gods Zeus and Hera (classical scholars, just sit this one out). The infant is set to enjoy a heavenly existence on Mount Olympus until Stephen Carlile's enjoyably batshit Hades strips away the baby's immortality. Cast out of Olympus and raised by a human single mother, Luke Brady's adult Hercules belatedly discovers his divine parentage and resolves to become a hero, dragging Trevor Dion Nicholas's gruff warrior trainer Phil out of retirement to assist him. Heroic exploits follow: the special effects aren't groundbreaking, but they're good fun, especially the setpiece battle between Hercules, Phil and a many-headed puppet hydra. Brady is a boyish and likeable lead. His permawhite smile is bigger than his pecs – but it's kind of the point that he's not a beefcake, but rather an affable young man bewildered by his own strength. Mae Ann Jorolan gives good 'sassy love interest' as Hercules's sassy love interest, who is called Meg for some reason. They have a particularly great scene together where Meg is lecturing the smitten young man about how it's misogynist to assume she needs his help, and he keeps beatifically zoning out to sing about how hot she is. It's all absolutely fine, and accepting it's not a screechingly ambitious piece of work then perhaps all it really lacks is a big showstopper moment. The songs are solid, but there's no 'Circle of Life'/'A Whole New World'/'Let It Go'-style megabanger. Carlile's Hades turning into a much bigger puppet version of himself in the final showdown almost does the trick visually, but the scene as a whole is a muddle: it's unclear where the climactic battle between the gods is happening, or why it happens when it does, and the combat is pretty wishy washy until the afore-mentioned giga-puppet turns up. Disney musicals have vast budgets and The Lion King is an ongoing reminder that even staying within the lines of the IP, bold creatives can achieve something special with that dosh. Hercules, though, is one unit of generic Disney stage entertainment. It has charm, because it's adapted from a charming film and talented people have made it, but it's definitely not going to go down in legend.
