Good News!

Fortune cookie, NYC or TO, c.2003-5.

Booooo – That is how the French treat their women.

Weird day.

After escaping the cross-atlantic clutches of my new boss (who manages to motivate me to the same extent lions motivated Christians in ancient Rome), I fled to a discussion at Tate Modern. “The changing face of art and audience”. Hold on to your seats, folks. Unfortunately, as these things often do, it spiralled into mild navel-gazing over issues too far-reaching for a panel of 5 with 90mins, however it was interesting (and depressing, in a way) to see just how naieve some people are in British creative organisations, about the importance of online metrics and recordable usage statistics, etc., and to find out only about 2 in every 100 Brits watch Cultural TV programmes. And they’re mostly over 55. I guess that makes me the odd one out.

Now, half an hour along the Jubilee line from Tate Modern on a Thursday night gets you to The Luminaire, which won the NME’s ‘best UK live venue’ at about 10pm. It’s a great, intimate space (with SUPERB flyers – see below); very similar to King Tuts Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow (nominated also), but with more of a 50s lounge vibe. It’s noticably clean, and the stage features a domed ceiling and disco ball directly above the band – a nice touch, as the reflected globules of light fall across the audience and not the band but behind it. I’d not been before, yet I could tell I was going to like the place when before I’d even stepped foot in it I spied a sly thigh and kneehigh sock through the tiny window behind the ticket clerk. It belonged to one of a pair of willowy, raven-haired mods by the name of The Tall Poppies, and pleasently tall they were. And harmonious. Later a French duo appeared – the guy a spitting image of Caligari’s Cesare – the girl managing to take being French, long brown hair, a lowcut dress and base guitar and …. (incomprehensibly) not come out being anything like the sex bomb that this equation warranted. Though she did shake her legs adorably whilst playing. They were called “John & Jehn”, and as my buddy pointed out, one could well imagine them repeating those names to each other whilst locked in a really creepy kind of coitus after the show. Any doubt as to their place of birth was quashed by Jehn’s refusal to do an encore because, well, she just didn’t feel like it

I spent the train ride home overhearing the sound of a recorded video on a passenger’s phone, of her friend trying to feed her baby ice cream.

Weird night.

Chip upper lip, old boy.

I’ve been seeing London through foriegn spectacles these past few weeks and I’m all the better for it. Playing tourguide to Yanks and Aussies. I’m warming to it; cheese and wine in cellars, playing cards with Satan in Lynchian Wapping (before he tried to make out with me), drinking in an oppulent backstage boudoir, flicking through porn over coffee, reading some of Beckham’s early handwritten correspondance (“I just got my first wage packet. I got £120 …”), drinking in Britain’s tiniest snug bar, seeing horror at the theatre, fairies under London Bridge, eating Okonomi, fish curry, jam rolly polly & custard, venison pie, Welsh cakes, yuzu chocolate truffles and blowing over £100 across Turnmills and the Ministry of Sound (though upon exiting at 5.30am I won the MOS entrance fee back on a scratchcard).

I also bumped into someone in the National Portrait Gallery who I’d met at The Met in NY back in November ‘05 (art geeks tend to travel in small, albeit international, circles). Leading from our brief conversation I was inspired to get back into practical fine art and also dip into ‘art business’. So I’ll be looking into part time courses … and what to do/where to live in 2006! Oh, and I might get round to finding out where in the world half of my genes come from.

“I love the sea, and I love England as long as you can see the edge of it”. AA Gill (author, ‘This Angry Isle’).

And his words on what Churchill referred to as ‘old friends’ – the only food stuffs exempt from WWII rationing: “Fish and chips is … generally better remembered than eaten. It’s a totem of Englishness, a thing that is more than mere dinner and rather less than actual food. … Fish and chips is a silent meal. You shouldn’t talk and eat. It is a race against falling temperature. You need to be perfectly concentrated, constantly blowing and sucking, wolfing with bared teeth and flared nostrils”.

Whilst on a trashy British food note, I found this in a free mag in a bar in Paris (selling wonderful glasses of house red for just £1.20!), extholing the marvels of the English fry-up or, Brunch A L’Anglaise; “Enfin une idee originale pour bruncher a PAris! Sur de grandes tables facon cantine, vivez une experience culinaire rare: beans, jacket potatoes, sausages et bacon, assortis de scrambled eggs, scones, blueberries et delicieuses doucers a l’anglaise, vous reprendrez bien une tasse de the?” If you couldn’t translate that, the accompanying image was pretty self explanatory:

They weren’t kidding when they said ‘une experience culinaire rare’.

Something a little more confusing, is just what goes on at this little bar in the backwater town of Commercy in central France. Sexy drink party and an avalanche of T-shirts? Sounds like heaven. Checkout the flyer:

I also managed to catch the ‘Velasquez’/'Tim Gardner’ shows at the NG, the ‘Photographic Portrait Prize’ at the NPG, the ‘Fischli & Weiss’/'David Smith’ shows at TM and ‘Bound For Glory’ at The Photographers’ Gallery.

London Fog

At 8am riverside and midnight roadside yesterday:

Bombs.

My day off. So not in central London today. 10.30am. I get back from the shop and my sister answers the door. Gives me a hug. Says a couple of bombs have gone off in central London …

Why pick those stations? Others could have produced far greater numbers of casualties. Trafalgar or Leicester Square, Covent Garden, Waterloo, Euston, Clapham Junction. Why not earlier when the tubes and buses would have been far busier? Some sort of (even greater) cowardice? Even using a twisted logic, it doesn’t really make sense. Not that I am not compassionate, but Watching it unfold on TV just felt to me like watching similar incidents in Madrid, Turkey and Israel. I recognised most of the sites. Remembered vividly times I spent in some of those exact spots. Yet it didn’t seem like it was happening in London. Not my home. It felt to me as alien as watching the Xmas episode of “House” today, in the middle of July. But then it shouldn’t matter where these things happen, but the simple fact that THEY DO happen. The new BBC policy of regulating ‘live’ footage was obviously abandoned. I’d be livid if I knew the dead guy who, naked from the waist up was lying there shuddering as the ambulance staff tried to resuscitate him as they carried him into the hospital. Close-up. Unflinching. 11am. I noticed it was the only piece of footage they didn’t repeat.

Unlucky mate.