documenta, the most anticipated efflorescence of contemporary art, blooms once every five years, for precisely a hundred days, in the central German city of Kassel. This thirteenth edition (9 June - 16 September) is a daring attempt to test the limits of the form and to induce 'a vertiginous doubt about what art can be.' Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is adamant that she is not curating an art exhibition and talks of guest 'participants' including scientists, writers and philosophers. One of them, Fiona Hall, shares her host's insistence on art as research rather than product. Suggesting arte povera, she transforms quotidian material into organic forms, exploring consumerism, endangerment and extinction. Her focus could not, unfortunately, be more topical. dOCUMENTA (13) coincides with Art Basel (4-17 June), where the temporary Schaulager satellite is a microcosm of the greater Schaulager – a pioneering 'viewing warehouse', neither museum nor repository, for the collection of the Emanuel Hoffman Foundation. At the other end of creativity's temporal axis, the Ceramic Art of Ancient Cyprus at Melbourne's Ian Potter Museum of Art reaches back several millennia. If the island artefacts elicit longing for the primeval repose of the beach, even a brief stay at qualia near the Great Barrier Reef will refresh the globe-trotting art seeker. In its original sense, 'qualia' (subjective experiences of things) matters very much at Aesop. Curiosity, a passion for both the avant-garde and the ancestral, an inherent desire for excellence in all things – for places and situations of all kinds where these qualities are required, please enquire within.
READ
The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures have been delivered at Harvard since 1926 by the year's Professor of Poetry – someone who, though not necessarily a poet in the strictest sense, lives for the poetic. (On the other side of the Charles River, William O'Brien Jr is injecting some lyricism of his own into our Boston debut on Newbury Street.) Past Norton lectors include Stravinsky, Pier Luigi Nervi, Nadine Gordimer and Frank Stella, and fortunately for those who could not attend, the most memorable lectures are available in book form, and sometimes as podcasts – moveable, digital, intellectual feasts with such hosts as Jorge Luis Borges.
EAT
The proprietor of Sansuya has spent most mornings since 1968 inspecting the previous day's catch at Tokyo's famed Tsukiji Market. Back in Ginza, the 'shacho' serves each ingredient without even a pinch of pretension, so as to preserve its straight-from-the-sea flavour. Staff and patrons bask with equal delight in the warm atmosphere, and the elderly lady at the traditional sliding door has evidently spent a lifetime perfecting the ancient art of greeting. Consequently, this hole-in-the-wall sometimes seems haunted by the more provincial, less western ghost of Old Ginza. Our own neighbouring brick-and-tsuga store shares this same spirit of the pre-neon past.
VISIT
September marks the migration of film purists to a village in the peaks of Colorado. Consistent with its low-key locale, the not-for-profit Telluride Film Festival is all altitude without attitude – the perfect vantage point from which to expand one's cinematic horizon. The organisers' eye for the idiosyncratic has served them in discovering and celebrating bracing new auteurs and films, from Coppola père to Marjane Satrapi, and from Blue Velvet to The Lives of Others.
PLAY
Candlepin bowling is unique to Canada and New England. Played with narrower pins, it is more challenging than conventional 'ten pin' bowling as well as safer (the smaller ball hurts less when dropped on a foot, as it must eventually be). Bowlers have been playing strings at Sacco's Bowl Haven, on the outskirts of Boston, since 1939. This family establishment is pleasantly old-school with an impressive selection of local microbrews on tap. Prepare for a weekend afternoon of candlepin with the brunch at Henrietta's Table on Harvard Square: the unlikely encounter between an all-you-can-eat buffet and fresh, sustainable, delicious fare.
DRINK
As the summer solstice nears, Mediterranean shores glitter with ice cubes clinking in glasses of the local anisette. The Provençal antidote to thirst is pastis – 'mixture' in the local dialect. Each distiller selects the botanicals for the alembic – there is no single recipe – but too often the subtler aromas are overwhelmed by liquorice. So Aqualanca does without it. The name is from calanques, Edenic inlets which cleave the dry limestone cliffs east of Marseille. On canicular days the cloudy drink is as refreshing as a plunge into the glistening blue.
SUPPORT
When the late food historian Alan Davidson became a Visiting Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, in 1978, academical eyebrows were raised in outrage that such trivia should be taken other than facetiously. Building on Davidson's efforts, the interdisciplinary Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery (6-8 July) remains open to all who are interested in what is, was or will be eaten. Topics range from the mundane (the cooking pot) to the melancholy (disappearing foods). The atmosphere is as informal as the scholarship is serious, and the registration fee is low enough to be palatable to most, especially as it includes five gastronomic meals – reminding over-zealous symposiasts that food is more at home on the table than on the desk.
SLEEP
Even within Beirut's collage of cultures, Hayete Guesthouse is an intriguing conflation of Lebanese aesthetics, art nouveau finishes and contemporary photography. B&Bs are uncommon in this city of high-rise hotels where little physical remains of the erstwhile 'Paris of the Middle-East'. It is from such modest rooms that one can best revel in the enduring genius of this place. On the way from the guesthouse to the beach, Aesop essentials are at Ginette, where retail meets art, and on Saturdays there is a healthy picnic of fresh and local produce waiting to be negotiated in the alleys of Souk El Tayeb.
INSPIRING WOMEN
Adrienne Rich defined poetry as 'a rift, a peculiar lapse' in our experience of reality. She knew in her flesh that this 'exchange of electrical currents through language' could alter the course of human events. Rich was a radical both on and off the page: women's liberation (including her own) could not bear metrical constraints. Minute in stature but Calliopean in eloquence, this generously erudite woman shone a sometimes unflattering but always searching light on the world she has recently exited.
LISTEN
In times of mourning, it is at its most glacial and meditative that music can elevate the spirit, as in Arvo Pärt's 'Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten' (1977). Britten's passing in the previous year was a defining moment for Pärt, who had just started to appreciate the purity of the Englishman's style and had set out to adapt it into something unmistakably his own. This became Pärt's 'tintinnabula' technique, which in this early iteration transmutes a series of descending minor scales into a soaring celebration of Britten's life. Advancing behind a still, austere façade, this piece exemplifies Pärt's rare ability to move both the discerning and the untrained ear.
'If they give you lined paper, write the other way.' William Carlos Williams