On the soothing shores of Thames

Polling

After I have abused the local cafe's hospitality for most of the morning, I have arrived home to discover that my replacement modem has arrived in the post. Yippee's all around. 

Consequently I decided to pimp my blog a bit. There are two reasons for this. One, because I enjoy it, two, because you people (friends, because I haven't really heard from random readers) keep telling me how you like/love/enjoy reading my rants, but there is hardly any written evidence of this. I write this up as general laziness. After all you are my friends, so we surely have that in common. Now, all you have to do is click at the bottom of each post, to rate my attention starved cyber-verbal diarrhea. Needless to say, the two choices refer to one of my favourite past times. The drunkenness is guaranteed either way it's just the size of the hangover that will be different. So, hop to it!

I realize that this is the second blog-post of the day, and this makes me somewhat of a pale-skinned social degenerate, so to give you the cyber-finger and try to prove you wrong I need to tell you that I am leaving for the Southbank Center Chocolate Festival in 15 minutes. La-dee-daa, in your face :)

Artsy Farts

Having some serious budget deficit issues due to the posh dining and wining of last weekend, last night was spent at home with a dear friend and several bottles of wine. So, even though I can't link you towards any special place to eat or drink this time, you will be glad to know that, exceptionally enough, I am with my constant companion, the hangover. 

The first time I went to the library, I fell off a curb. So the following incident should have not come as a surprise. I have set out to begin the laborious process that is the writing of the first few pages of my thesis. Motivated, I have decided to wash some glasses in the spirit of 'clean surroundings, clear mind'. As I thrust the sponge into the glass, it just gave up all will to live and broke in half in my hand. The result was a gaping wound that I held under cold water for a good half hour. 30 minutes is a long time. I was bored. So I decided to play around a bit. Call it art, call it self-entertainment, I actually quite like the results. *Contains flashing images*

I guess the lesson I should learn is that fate does not want me to write my thesis. Or only after considerable blood loss and extensive bruising. Thanks for the heads up.

Pop-art and doll hair

It's Friday afternoon, and I already laboured 5 hours in SSEES , and more importantly I already had a beer, so beyond re-registering, I only have mental capacity to exploit the free wi-fi here in the British Library. It is a lovely space; the quiet and presumably highly intellectual whispering of the cafe crowd is rather soothing and I can practically feel my MA thesis writing itself from the ridiculous amount of knowledge detectably lingering in the air. 

On this note, I will dedicate this post to all the (two) cultural outings I've had this past few days. On the beautiful Sunday afternoon I dragged my wretched, hungover body to Marble Arch, which was in itself a huge effort, but I concluded that it would be a waste to turn back now. I admired my new favourite public statue (left) and then I listened to a few people sharing their ideas at the Speakers' Corner. It was actually quite dull, as religion exclusively took over, here a rabbi, there's a priest, there's a tree hugger ... well you get the picture. Nevertheless, I do believe that I was just there at the wrong time, surely there must be also other things occupying people's minds. I strolled to the Serpentine Gallery to check out Richard Hamilton's exhibition (free!) which is the first since 1992 and it is on until April 25th. His representation and commenting on contemporary events, such as riots, terrorism and international conflicts seemed spot on and his strong criticism of the media representation was a fresh air for my starved conscious in this mass-informed society. However, I was never good at understanding the workings and methods of pop-art, and his, conceptually speaking, black and white representation of certain delicate problems (such as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict) were too crude for my taste. He definitely made me think, but once that happened, he left me longing for some shading. 

Alice Anderson's Time Reversal (until April 24th) at the Riflemaker was a whole other matter. Having thought I may have issues with my mother from time to time, I figured it could be interesting to see how an other woman, especially an artist goes on to resolve or understand such relations. Well, let me say, if I have issues I don't know what this woman has. The several meter long doll hair hanging from the first floor to the entrance door was only the beginning. For a quid you get to go down to the beyond-creepy basement, where the 12-minute short film 'The Night I Became a Doll' recounts the story of a little girl, who, to obey her mother's wishes of not speaking, not eating, not blinking, gradually transforms herself into this eerie porcelain doll. Positively chilling, however highly recommended. 

Hopefully I will finally have internet at home from Monday, so you can look forward to more regular cultural banter from this page. 

Novelties

It's been over a week I've moved into my (presently 'our') new place, and haven't had internet since, which led to the curious finding that I can procrastinate by reading non-required material, instead of taking notes on any of the 15 books that I should. So I am typing away from a cafe in Camden, and trying to conjure up the number of happenings of last weekend. 

The new apartment is fab, and I didn't notice any real problems with it until I fancied myself up, put on my Saturday-dress and headed for the door. Promptly I bounced back. It was stuck. Locked. Unmovable. Yanking the door. Panic. More yanking. More panic. You know what is more terrifying than being stuck outside of your place? It's to be stuck inside. There is very little to do there, if you are alone that is. There is a whole world outside, so I came to the, maybe surprising, conclusion that any day I would rather be stuck outside with the world, than inside, with virtually nothing to do, just circling around like a poisoned mouse. I had a randez-vous with a friend I met in Colombia. Unfortunately, his cell is Swedish and I quickly ran out of 'foreign credit', so after begging him to come and rescue me, I had to resort to calling an other friend with a UK cell to call Sweden and continue the directions, while I glued myself to the little window of my entrance door. The door was pried open after some considerable efforts by my friend and later on by the neighbour's part. At this point I only had time for a quick catch up drink with my knight in shining armour, before heading up to fancy restaurant numero dos this weekend, Tamarai. Unfortunately, the night before, I couldn't properly enjoy numero uno, as I already had dinner at a remote, little, nevertheless exquisite, phillippino restaurant at the end of Charlotte street. So when I arrived to Gaucho , and they brought out the glisteringly beautiful and mouthwatering stakes on a cutting board to choose from; in tears I had to resign myself to the idea of having a miserable little ceviche, which, naturally, was nothing compared to the ones to be had on a Peruvian beach under lot less glittery circumstances. Saturday night was spent, well, spending. We ended up in Sketch, whose egg shaped toilets still cause me little shivers of joy when casting eyes upon them. I'm pretty sure it is quite bizarre to get so excited about toilets, but I can't help it. 

I can no longer pretend that I still have even a morsel of bagel left on my plate, so I will dutifully and with head hanging proceed to pack up my stuff and head back to the library. Tear. 

Sunshine!!!

London is going totally crazy. It is sunny, and warm, and dry, and generally just not very London-like. It is truly hard to get any work done, all I want to do is wonder around, preferably in a park and offer my face up to the warm strokes of the sun, sit around and recharge my solar-power operated batteries. I think it is due to the, on average, way too many rainy, cloudy or foggy days in this city, that you can tell without much difficulty, who are the ones who really live here. No true Londoner will ever put on sunglasses. You will look around on a day like this and you can instantly pick out the squinting, happy locals, with that goofy smile on their faces. The only people that will actually put on shades are tourists and fashion-victims. And me, when I am insanely hungover. 

Which was the case on Sunday, so after a healthy, long walk in Hyde park, my dehydrated brain couldn't take it anymore and I had to escape into the Victoria & Albert, to soothe my pounding head with some coolness and darkness. I checked out the Digital Design exhibition, which is running until the 11th of April in Porter House. It was pretty damn cool, although the lot of flashing and beeping didn't exactly help my hangover. I had difficulty of understanding some of the technological lingo posted as explanations, but I sure had a hell of a time playing around with all the interactive stuff. I always love seeing adults shedding their adulty-pretentiousness and becoming children again, which was added benefit of the exhibit as grown-ups laughed, jumped around and played with the pieces. My personal favourites were the dandy-lion whose seeds were blown away and flew according to the direction of your movements, as you were holding a working hairdryer. 

And then there were the little spermatozoids and eggs digitalized on a screen, under sand that you could move. The little baby-makers sensed where there was no sand and they started multiplying there. Unfortunately, not a lot of people made the effort to actually read what the point was, they just liked touching the sand, so there was a lot of smiley face drawing going on, which didn't really allow the little things enough sand-less space to go play. Oh and the montage of hundreds people (couples of 50% woman-woman, 30% woman-man and 20% man-man if I remember correctly) almost kissing. As you walked past, a sensor picked up on your movements, and the couples started going at it. Some, rather heavily.

But I could go on and on. The point is, go and see it, it is a great feeling, playing like a child inside, and then stepping outside and continuing on like that in the blazing London sunshine.

Out and about

I met up with a former classmate and friend from the alma mater tonight in the chic, up-and-coming bar Aqua Nueva. Beautiful design, amazing smells of food streaming in from their Spanish and Japanese themed restaurants and the usual uptight and overdressed crowd. We had a great time, and she suggested that, after two bottles of Cava, we take a wonder down to Cuckoo Club, her often frequented place to hang out. Which would have been, supposedly, great fun, except that she has been drinking since lunch, so the doorman whom she was tight with, deemed her unfit to enter even before she opened her mouth. We hang around for a bit, trying to convince him that she wasn't as unstable as she may have appeared, but he was unmoved. Sharing a fag, trying to figure out the future party options, I mentioned that as she usually went out alone, my presence as a sort of chaperone, could have impeded her chances of getting in. Before long, she bade me goodbye to attempt her way into the club on her own. 

This is a thing I really hate about London. You can never actually aim at going out on a weekend night without sufficient amount of planning. You either circle around town like 'bird-shit in the air' as the Hungarian saying goes, or you are giving up all your self-respect, trying to beg your way into where you want to party. A total buzz killer. 

I was expecting having dinner before the catching up deteriorated into the Cava, so I was pretty gone and completely exhausted from a day of library-ing after only the alcohol part of the night delivered. Catching the night buses to Notting Hill I got the chance to observe the desperate crowd lined up in front of Amica. There was even a guy in wheelchair involved, for the sake of persuasion. For crying out loud.

Optimistically enough, I was wearing heels, despite the breaking and tumbling incidents of last weekend. I usually speed-walk to the rhythm of my music, so, my Ipod on shuffle, out of the 3631 songs (just checked for the sake of accuracy) I stumbled upon the following two great tunes, which I kept playing over and over to slow me down, to cheer me up and to give me a nice chilled way of walking, without tripping over anything. 

Ok, never mind, somehow I can't upload or attach the videos from YouTube, but here are the links. 

I Heard It Through The Grapevine by Marvin Gaye

and

Nika Pata Lambo by Kaissa

Sunday, Monday, happy days...

So I fell off a curb today, because this is how I spend my in-between library time. And I realized that before my own clumsiness or a London cabbie kills me, I think I should update my blog. Oh, the priorities. I spent a day and a half recovering after a weekend long high school reunion, which left me broken in body, but quite uplifted in soul. 

Naturally, the first, Friday, night was a bit awkward, trying to sum your life up in the past 7 years, to people you are not even sure care, can be dull. Of course this was only until the boy arrived who makes everybody drink. Heavily. After that conversation became more or less meaningless, but a whole lot more entertaining. S, my true best friend from those days, and I caught several night buses until we made it from Brick Lane to Notting Hill, but time flew by as we drunkenly stumbled around London. 

Saturday, we spent the whole, beautifully sunny day, trying to get from NH to Barbican to check out Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's new installation, The Curve. A musical composition with zebra finches flying around, decking out and feeding themselves sick on top of electric guitars connected to amps and creating some truly weird sounds of Mother Nature's rock'n'roll. Dinner was pleasant, but the banging club music at Tiger Tiger a little later didn't really help the long over due catch up, but the vodka sure flew abundantly. So much, in fact, that true to form I tripped on some stairs and ended up breaking off my boot heel completely. Thank god, S found it, but as there wasn't anyway of reattaching it I elegantly limped around for the rest of the night. I'm not sure I fell because the heel came off or I just TUI (Tripped Under the Influence haha) and consequently the boot fell apart. It is a very egg or chicken conundrum. Not surprisingly, I didn't remember this significant moment until the next day, when looking for something else, I found the missing part of the footgear in my bag.

Sunday turned out to be much more debaucherous than planned. Instead of a quiet stroll through Camden market, we managed to get tangled up in several bottles of wine with two other old mates and ended up having a rockingly great catch up time, which really felt like how a reunion should feel like.  

Monday brought a hangover to die from after my head has rolled away to an undefined location. S, left in the morning, I'm not sure how; I was still dying. Was dying through most of Tuesday too, although that may have been only a case of severe laziness, and Wednesday I finally got my ass to the library. So now that I most carefully, and less so entertainingly walked you through my week, here I will stop, and promise not to write anymore, because, well I will be in the library. And I try not to use 'boring' as a deadly weapon. Cheerio. 

Happy World Book Day, 2010

The 11 o'clock viewing just got cancelled. It was a dream place. Affordable and spacious. And it will stay so, because I will never see that it was actually a ran down hole. So I will keep beating myself up about it that I have missed out on this possibly perfect opportunity. This is what viewings are really for. To see what you do NOT want. But no fretting, I still have a quarter to 12 and a half 12 appointment to see where we do not wish to live. As you can see I am resorting to morose skepticism in order to not be disappointed, as I was when the agent called minutes ago to cancel the viewing and I went into a not-so-dignified chain of cussing, that may have offended my neighbours on the other side of the paper thin walls. 

You will be glad to know, that I still haven't made it to the library, since the last brief visit to register for my library card (which is actually a piece of yellow paper with a barcode sticker on it, fancy huh?). London is sunny! Who in their right mind would voluntarily imprison themselves within four walls, when spring comes trotting into the grey and rainy town? So I took a long, wonderful and bathing-in-the-sunshine walk in Hyde Park. Then, took a long, wonderful and bathing-in-the-sunshine walk in Regents Park. Then ... alright, to cut to the chase I also walked up to Camden and then Kentish Town. Let me tell you, I walked everywhere except to the library. 

I also wondered into a bookstore, when I was waiting for my randez-vous with the Doctor. I should have learned never ever to do that. It is dangerous activity for my time and also money. I could live in a bookstore. Just sit on the ground, and devour everything from classic to cult, through non-fiction to cook books. Somehow, I never end up reading what I'm supposed to be reading (fascinating pieces for aiding the structuring of my theoretical framework - says me, swallowing back a little vomit) so basically I procrastinate from reading by reading. I walked away, with only the essentials. At one point I was clutching five books, and trying to decide on the verge of tears, which ones I should take home. I think this is what most people feel when they have to pick out puppies from a litter. 

Under the Frog (A béka segge alatt) by Tibor Fisher

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, y en español

and finally,

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk,

which by a simple game of 'reach-in-the-bag-and-see-what-you-get' was the first to be read. Sitting at Euston, waiting for the Doctor, the station disappeared as I was sucked in to the horror and insight of the narrative. I actually had to look up at times, to tear myself away from the vivid images that my mind kept belching up of torn intestines, mouths bleeding from cold sores and carrots. While I was trying to find the appropriate balance between continuing reading and registering that there is still a somewhat normal reality around me, I noticed that the girl next to me is immersed in the Bible. I don't think I've ever seen anybody actually Reading the Bible. Nor at a coffee shop or on the bus or, in this case, at a train station. There is talk about it all the live long day, but not a sight of somebody just casually whipping it out. Of course, it is also possible that I haven't frequented the right places. So, I looked at my book, the one that is clinically dissects and smears the world the other is striving to build, and the other whose message is threatened or at least faded with the existence of the prior. I looked around, and it was only the two of us reading in a long row of people playing on their blackberries, iphones, ipads you name it, anything to not look and recognize each other, while from the Haunted rose cruel, disgusting and illuminating reality of the everyday life and from the Bible rose the promise, guilt and superiority of an other universe. And the girl and I played out the silent war of worlds from within our hands.  

Baby steps

At the end of this day I can proudly declare that I have a functioning phone and a number to go with it and I have re-registered at library of my alma mater. Furthermore, I successfully opened a bank account even though at the first branch this was denied to me, because my proof of residency was in an obscure language, which impeded the world's local bank to function properly. Anyhow, in a different branch it turned out that there is actually a whole account policy designed for oversees people taking British jobs. However, besides not being able enough to look up my UK postcode on the WWW based on my address (I wasn't supposed to touch anything, in case I may perform a swift security breach using Royalmail as portal) the otherwise really pleasant bank clerk and I had the following conversation:

"So you are doing your masters. Wow. So what is it in? Banking and accounting?" 

Maybe I was wearing something formal and tight-ass?

"No...I study something like sociology."

"Oh, well, that's good enough too."

WHAAAAAAT??? THE F****CK??? Thanks Mr. BankClerk that you approve of the direction of my education slash life. Weight off my shoulder. 

I also managed to book two apartment viewings for tomorrow. I've already had some email correspondence with the person who is letting the place I've already fallen in love with and, I wouldn't go so far as to call him eloquent, but he read clear and logical. When he picked up the phone, he sounded more like Hannibal. So if you don't hear from me in a few days, come and look for me. 

It has been a great day, I have gotten a whole lot done, and to put the cherry (well, prematurely) on the cake I even went for a run in the morning. Even though my nicotine soaked lungs couldn't take more than 15 minutes, I bathed in the beautiful forenoon sunshine, despite the cold that made me into a glass-cutter and incidentally made the eyes of the workmen pop out. 

Overall, I declare the day a total success. May my productivity increase. Amen.