To mash or not to mash

Mash-ups are great, but not when they mix disappointment with confusion, says Kent Valentine.

I love mash-ups. There's something wonderfully delicious about taking items, both excellent in their own right, and then mashing them up to produce something which is greater than the sum of its parts. Gin and tonic, the sandwich, and DJ BC's The Beastles, are all excellent mash-ups; disparate elements brought together to form a new and powerful creation, kinda like Voltron.

But the mash-up is a subtle alchemy, and should only be courted by those with both an intimate knowledge of all the ingredients and their behavior when mashed. Ingredients can be volatile and the stakes can be high. Find yourself two partners and you might end up with a ménages a trois, but you're just as likely to get a court order and two weeks in intensive care.

Sometimes this is a matter of juggling the quantities involved, but other times it's just a matter of realising that some things, no matter how awesome they are on their own, are not going to play well together: chocolate Quik and oysters, milk and carbon dioxide, and a film museum combined with an aquarium.

“What?” I hear your say. “Who on Earth would try to combine a film museum and an aquarium?” Short answer: The French. Not content with tourist bucks rolling in from the Eiffel tower or the Louvre, everyone's favourite cheese-eating surrender monkeys have recently attempted to combine the worlds of modern cinema and oceanic fauna with Cinéaqua, a mash-up that is about as welcome as chlamydia and daytime television and as successful as cold fusion.

If you want cinema and fish at the same time, watch The Little Mermaid, or eat sushi at Hoyts. What ever you do, don't travel to Paris and throw 20 euros down the gullet of the French in order to stare at a half empty fish tank opposite a plastic mannequin painted to look like the Terminator.

Rating: Cinéaqua scores 1 out of 5 clams painted to resemble film reels.

- Kent Valentine