On my radar: Oliver Jefferss cultural highlights

2 | Nonfiction

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by R Buckminster Fuller (1968)

This is the book that has had the most impact on me recently. It treats Earth as a spaceship that has finite fuel that cant be restocked, and its about how we survive as a species without spiralling into oblivion. Its surprisingly apt for today, and also slightly depressing because all these predictions based on scientific thinking that seem obvious when theyre written have not happened. People are fallible and compelled to make the same mistakes over and over. Its a fascinating read, especially as Im trying to explain this planet to my one-year-old son and it was a really interesting take on the whole thing. There are so many pearls of wisdom in it.

3 | Sport

Boxing in Brooklyn

I went to see the title fight for the featherweight championship a few weeks ago. There was this boxer from Belfast, Carl Frampton: the place was rammed to the rafters and I think almost two-thirds were from Northern Ireland. The bar staff were going, Weve never seen anything like this. Normally when people come for a concert or basketball you dont get crowds singing songs in the bar. It was a great fight and Frampton won, so hes the new champion. The atmosphere was electric and it was a fantastic evening: Belfast in Brooklyn.

4 | Place

County Antrim, Northern Ireland

I try to go back to Belfast as often as I can, a couple of times a year. Last time I took no phone, no radio, and went for a drive up the north coast of Antrim. Its a beautiful piece of coastline: rugged and wild and also quite barren. There arent really any trees, its mostly heath and rock. Ive used photographs Ive taken there as the basis for several landscape paintings. I had fish and chips just outside Ballymena and then went to Ballintoy, where my wife and I were married they film Game of Thrones there now and I went for a walk along the pier. It was absolutely stunning and one of the best days Ive had in a while.

5 | Music

Chris Thile (mandolinist)

Chris won the MacArthur prize, or genius grant, for a musical project hes doing. He figured out that Bach concertos and partitas were better played on a mandolin than a violin, because of the subtlety: to hit the particular chords that use the top and bottom string, you have to play the violin quite aggressively, to physically get the bow to do that. But with the mandolin you can pluck very gently, so you can play these pieces quite differently to how theyve been played before. He came by the studio and played me some, and my jaw nearly hit the floor. It was just incredible.

6 | Performance

Duke Riley, Fly By Night

Duke Riley is an artist who did this project at the start of the summer. Over a couple of years he trained 2,000 pigeons to fly a little bit later each evening, and then did this half-hour performance where he flew them from a boat in the Brooklyn navy yard. They all had LED lights attached to them, and just as dusk was settling, and the city is starting to disappear, all these pigeons took off it was pretty surreal. It looked like you were under water watching a shoal of fish. It was one of the most beautiful things Ive ever seen: bizarre, abstract and completely arresting.

7 | Restaurant

Fort Defiance, Brooklyn

This is a bar/restaurant in Red Hook, which is an area thats sort of cut off from the rest of Brooklyn; its very nautical, because thats historically where all the ships came in. Its mostly classic American fare, but theres this one Mexican dish, huevos rancheros the greatest thing Ive ever eaten. I asked them about the dish and they said that the chefs are all Mexican, and the owner came in one day and thats what they were cooking for themselves for breakfast. It was their mothers recipe. The owner had some and insisted on putting it on the menu.

8 | Exhibition

Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, Met Breuer, New York

This is a collection of paintings throughout the years, from the Renaissance right through to the modern day, that for one reason or another were left unfinished, and there are little stories beside them as to why. There are Picassos in there, a Rembrandt, and I think a Caravaggio. Theres one contemporary portrait painter whose sitter never came back, and she has no idea why. Then theres a beautifully rendered Renaissance portrait of a woman painted in such detail, and then the face is painted out she obviously wasnt happy with it. As you look at it today, hundreds of years later, it looks like a collage, just flat blocks of colour.

A Child of Books by Oliver Jeffers is published by Walker (12.99). Click here to order a copy for 10.65