bluntie

sunny intervals and blustery rain.

i heart. thank you, little one. soft and dusty flea-market cafe insides, fixie-irrelevant bicycles outside, parks with hills, socialist courtyards with children in them, breathtaking shops and girls and boys, and a tree in a park filled with babies’ dummies. beautiful from a distance, a bit weird, and slightly sinister in the detail.

original french title: Terre des Hommes (land of men)
found this book in the street, just outside a church garden, a ‘rich autobiographical narrative’ by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince.
clearly i will read it in search of serendipitous messages, but actually the best thing was finding within the pages of the book, last week on the 20th august 2009, a receipt for a meal in italy from the 20th august 2001. long long ago, before the euro…
they had beer, wine, formaggio, antipasto, a primo and 2 secondos.

you are my every day, my everything.

sandalwood incense, darkened room full of tribal mask antiquities on polite museum stands. till you see one of them has a big-mac for a face. and there is a rustic hand-carved hamburglar. brilliant.

^The Chapman Family Collection

Eva Rothschild’s 70-metre-long Cold Corners was nice, but painfully familiar.

and damien hirst is fucking rubbish always. NO PIC.

in the line to the club on friday night. i tried to leave early, suddenly in pain from sounds of broken photocopiers, loud toasters and other wonkey kitchen equipment, but there was a crime scene blocking the exit. i really want to find out if he survived, but sickeningly realise there is no outlet for this sort of news. i can type ‘whitechapel stabbing 14th august’ into google as much as i like but all i get are gig reviews of stabbing basslines. twitter has a little more to say:
Missed the stabbing at Rhythm Factory. Did get locked in a bus whilst comatose though. Yay, it’s the weekend!
and
apparently someone got kicked to death and they shut it down
but twitter doesn’t give answers (?)
what would be front page examiner (launceston, population 100,000) and somewhere in the age (melbourne, pop. 3.9m) becomes invisible in london (9m).  obviously there are only so many (paper or online) pages in a newspaper no matter what the readership. so; i have questions about whether there is an ideal or maximum size for a city, and what it is, and whether local news has been completely owned by the councils who um own it.

just up the road in stoke newington, with the backs of terrace houses bordering it, tucked away, i never knew it was so beautiful and so close: a sudden world of old-ness, green-ness and overgrown disrepair just off the high street.
un-crowded for a green space on a sunny saturday in london. everyone there today was either taking photos for their blogs, emerging suspiciously from the blackberry ivy and stinging nettles, or passed out in the sunshine, a quarter of a bottle of white with the cork floating in it and a mobile phone at his feet. nice that the phone was still there.

(also the setting for amy winehouse’s back to black video)

went to the hayward gallery this afternoon to see Walking In My Mind , was beautiful.

despite the attraction of installations (like Thomas Hirschhorn’s immense brown-packing-tape lined cave, and Chiharu Shiota’s string web, and Pipilotti Rist’s dark room), i liked best:

Charles Avery’s drawing of a whale-y creature and the inhabitants of an imaginary island, the encyclopedic exploration of  which has been the artist’s epic project for the past decade (?).

^this is not it, but just an example of his island…

and
one little panel of Keith Tyson’s collage of paintings, a part which was not even a painting but one or two hundred words about being blind; a world without objects but with hundreds of delicately and deeply sensed events in space.

the Hayward is nice to visit because actually i like cold harsh ugly brutalism.

isn’t sustainability a tiny bit graphically abhorrent and inciting of recklessness?

1.The East End’s Jack the Ripper
2.Bunhill Field’s John Milton’s Paradise Lost
3.all the dead people in the muddy Thames
4.Columbia Road’s White Cat