London II: The Falling Bridge , The Drowned World, The Tate & Typographic Art Books in Shoreditch 22.10.2009. London ...continuing where we left off...woke up...j had some meetings again, in the west end... so i roamed about, north, trying to find something interesting to see, to witness, into Regents Park...
crisp autumn weather, waterfowl [some pictured in the last post]...back down through Marylebone [got to love it for the name if anything]...past Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum [essentially an atrocious fractal of London]...anything genuine long since worn thin...everything seemingly a parody of itself, veiled in plastic...there's not a lot of variety in London...there might not be a lot of fast food joints [actually there are, especially McDonalds], but there sure are a lot of PRETs, EATs & GBKs everywhere, "healthy fast food" [an oxymoron if you ask me]...it's better than the likes of McD's perhaps, but as disturbing as Starbucks in their unbridled proliferation...not that i have anything against these places in particular, i got a sandwich at PRET one day & stateside i've eaten at Chipotle as much as the next guy [at least before there were decent taco stands in NYC]...my beef is not so much with these chained establishments, but what these places have [REPLACED]...they take away [OPTIONS] & [VARIETY] REplacing it with homoGENeity...diluting the gene pool of what's genuine...when it comes down to it a lot of London looks the same to me, the same sequence of storefronts...NYC [& Rome & Paris] are one of the few cities not completely overrun with chainstores...with the exception of the old pubs [albeit many of them now with chic "gastropub" makeovers] & a few indie bookstores, i didn't notice a lot of mum & pop action or specialty shops in London...occasionally you'd come across the odd original establishment, like these "whip makers" that specialized in umbrellas, canes & swordsticks...
but other than that, not a lot of variety, not like NYC where you walk a block & you're in a different city...i continued down in & out of Soho & Mayfair, down the glitzy Bond street....to Foyles on Charing Cross where i was to meet j [my blackberry doesn't work here which makes it hard to meet up]...had some time to kill so i started to read some Will Self book...some story where there was only 8 people left living in London, though that seems to be a recurring theme with him...i could relate because that's the vibe i was getting from being here...i picked it up because i guess he's a famous British writer you're supposed to read or something, that i've tried to read before & didn't get & don't get now either...i don't get that Martin Amis chap either after forcing myself to read a few of his boring drawn-out books...England might beat America in music, but America blows England away as far as writing goes...regardless, when in Rome read like the Romans, so i picked up another Will Self book [The Quantity Theory of Insanity]...the first story ["The North London Book of the Dead"] of which was also about London being full of dead people...imagine that...i also bought J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World [a dystopian book about a submerged London, post-climatic change...more on that later] & Murakami's book on running... j showed up at Foyles & we went back to the Royal Academy of Arts to check out the Anish Kapoor exhibit...what a waste of time & money, i wasn't that impressed...it all just seemed so gimmicky & overblown to me...in my mind, i just think of all the resources required to pull this shit off...huge monumental sculptures...tons & tons of grease, piles of poopy mud, huge slabs of rusty metal, all for what?...& mirrored objects, duh, of course people will like it because everyone likes to look at themselves...one exhibit had a cannon that would shoot wads of hot grease all over the museum wall [talk about throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks]...people were climbing over each other to witness the spectacle of it...but that's all it is—an expensive, messy & overcooked spectacle, amateur & immature...the first thing you are greeted with upon entering the exhibit is a giant vagina...ok, well not exactly, but a big hunk of rusty metal [ripping off Richard Serra] shaped like a vulva...duh, like that's never been done before...if you can exploit all the typical infantile Freudian motifs & have an exotic name, then funders [like Louis Vuitton] will give you tons of money so you can hire a team of helpers to build a bunch of stupid crap for you, with no thought behind it...there's parts of me that feel that way about Matthew Barney, but at least with Barney there's thoughtful & provoking ideas & concepts that back up his stadium-rockstar works... narcissistic Anish Kapoor sculpture at entrance & j & i buying into it
...not the first indulgent self-portrait of j & i reflected in an Anish Kapoor sculpture: here's us in the Cloud Sculpture in Chicago...you can't escape him...we ran into Kapoor again at the Tate, taking up valuable real estate, just like PRET, EAT & GBK—fast food art...easy to digest, safe & you know what to excpect...at the expense of the quieter, unknown outsider artists [slow food equivalent] that are never given a chance...& the crowds that such fast food art attracts are even more annoying, everyone poking & grabbing at the "art" despite all the intrusive signs everywhere telling people not to touch [only making them want to touch it more]...which i guess only made it funnier that the grease & powdery pigment "art" was all tarnished because everyone was sticking their grubby fingers in it...Kapoor belongs in Disneyland, not a museum... after that we went back down towards Buckingham Palace & Westminster because j wasn't with me that first day & she hadn't been for 20 years... requisite Westminster shot
crossed over to South Bank to Borough market, had a Dark Star beer at The Rake...quite possibly the best beer i've ever had...it was a nutty stout but not dense or too heavy, dark yet light...got on the Tube to Notting Hill to see what that neighborhood was all about...ate at some pub i can't remember the name of... i'm sure we had fish & chips... 23.10.2009 Tate Modern double-deckered to Tottenham Court, got off & walked through Convent Gardens & Holborn to St. Paul's...
crossed the Millennium Bridge to the Tate Modern...happiness is a massive museum...though funny that the word "FREE" needs to be written as big as the name TATE...as if FREE is the selling point...the Pop Life exhibit wasn't free, but no matter, i'm tired of "Pop" art & the likes of Koons & Warhol...two more artists that you can't seem to escape...the building itself that the Tate is housed in [formerly a power station] is a rather impressive structure... entrance to Tate Modern
the bottom floor has a huge black-body experiment sort of work by Miroslaw Balka—a vast empty & unlit container that you walk into, your eyes gradually adjusting...it was interesting, would've been even better if they let people in one at a time... wandered through the galleries...stand-outs for me included the Kurt Schwitters collages, some ink drawings by Henri Michaux & a whole bunch of Cy Twombly collage/images that were inspiring [in particular, the Natural History mushroom series]...a room full of Rothko & a room full of Cage-inspired images by Gerhard Richter...we got a beer [Fullers] at the cafe on the top floor, great view [see final photo below]...then went & got fish & chips at some pub on the river...the service sucks in this town...most waitstaff seem to hate their jobs & don't care, probably because they aren't getting tips [then again, a lot of places have taken to automatically adding a 15% "service charge," which is even stupider than tipping]...& most people you interact with in the tourist sector aren't even Brits, but Eastern European or African or from somewhere else...NYC is like that too to some extent, but you expect that from NYC, that's what it is & always has been...but London? the irony is that London Bridge is in Lake Havasu, Arizona, i've driven over it inadvertently...& what's the meaning of the nursery rhyme & who's this fair lady? if she's the sacrificed virgin buried in the bridge's foundation, to ensure it's strength, is this fair lady now entombed in some crap town in Arizona? GLA/City Hall & Tower Bridge [perhaps the bridge Arizona thought it was getting?]
clouds from roof of Tate
we continued along the south bank, becoming increasing annoyed at all the tourists & here we were one of them...through all sorts of random diversions through housing complexes, feeling like you were in Long Island City at best, really not a lot of charm at all to London but i already went into that in the last post, everything we saw just reconfirmed this...we crossed over the Tower bridge & into the City, then realized i forgot j's bag back in the pub so we had to tube back to London Station to get it...then hopped a double-decker back across up to Hoxton/Shoreditch, one of the more interesting parts of London... Old Blue Last pub in Shoreditch
found this cool bookshop, called well, bookart bookshop, full of all these indie & DIY homemade books & art books...
it was busy & there seemed to be a lot of interest, lots of people coming in & out, people actually buying books...i got a little handmade book from this cool Irish press, Red Fox Press called "50 & + / Poèmes des anné;es 50" by Julien Blaine...
the further up into Hoxton we got, the more depressing & sketchy it got...the teenagers in those prep school uniforms with those atrocious sweater vests creep me out, you can never tell what to expect, especially when there's gangs of them all looking the same...we retreated back down into the Shoreditch neighborhood which is probably the most interesting neighborhood we've seen in London, the only place that even looked remotely liveable to me...saw this exhibit at Kemistry Gallery dedicated to Herbert Spencer's seminal journal, Typographica...
on the streets we saw lots of graffiti & memes [some pictured in the last post] ...passed the London VICE office at some point...then we hopped a double-decker up through the northern hoods of Finsbury & Somerstown & Bloomsbury through King's Cross which seems all seemed pretty depressing & rat racey... the only previous image i have of King's Cross was when it was all over the news when the subway was bombed there... random wall i forget where
...we continued further west along Marylebone & got off at Paddington which seems like a cool neighborhood, i guess that's sort of the neighborhood we're staying in, on the north side of Hyde Park...though i'm sure it's not very affordable to live...for dinner we met K & E [the ones who hosted the infamous goat piñata party before we left for Africa & have since relocated to London] at some pub in Belgravia on some random back alley [mews as they call them here]...can't remember the beer i had, a xxx-something or other, a stout, which is never as stout as Irish stout...then we went to some gastropub...we took a cab back just because we hadn't yet experienced a London cab...a stylin' ride for sure...our driver was complaining about the annoying pedicabs & how they are all driven by foreigners giving tours of London though they could barely speak English [self-censoring himself because there "was a lady in the car"], then asked if we had this problem in New York...um, yeah...those damn pedicabs... London & Millennium bridge, as seen from roof of Tate Modern
25.10.2009 London to NYC [drowning blissfully in J.G. Ballard] had a last breakfast in London, then took the tube down to Earl's Court only to discover that the Piccadilly line to the airport was closed & we didn't have much time to figure out what else to do so had to take an expensive cab ride all the way to Heathrow...on the plane i read J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World...
these lofty & often brooding or repressed sentiments, while typically submerged, sometimes surface through Ballard's scenic descriptions [with weighted subtext] or at other times are just flat out revealed directly through dialogue:
this sort of talk might come off as lecturey or forced when taken out of context, but Ballard's timing is spot on & most of the novel is composed of suspenseful action & long descriptive passages that really make you feel like you're there, that build up to the payoff moments of revelation...here's an example of a descriptive passage, reminiscent of [but well-before] Cormac Mccarthy:
great stuff...timeless...swampy waters to float my own ark on...it has a lot in common with Mellis's The Revisionist, not just in it's apocalyptic vision, but it's told in a certain documentarian tone, from a convincing scientific point of view, during a time of global warming...& it doesn't pretend to offer preachy solutions, but just tells it like it is, making it seem even more realistic...Kerans [the protagonist] actually seems to enjoy living in this drowned world, in a sick & masochistic way, he resists moving north to safer & cooler climes when his research team leaves...& when pirates come along to drain the swamp of London to pillage & loot, he is deeply offended by the exposure & pines for the submerged swampland environs...at which point the novel takes on more of a suspenseful Lord of the Flies turn...i'm surprised The Drowned World hasn't been made into a movie...i've been meaning to read more Ballard since his recent death & after seeing Crash...i was not so much impressed with the movie as the idea behind the movie [though Cronenberg did execute it well]...& i've always been intrigued by the title The Atrocity Exhibition [which Joy Division subsequently named a song after]...i need to read more J.G. Ballard...i take back everything i said about there not being any good British writers, J.G. Ballard is it...
(c) 2009 Derek White
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