Yesterday Andrew, Chandler and I were guided up 48,000 ladders to the scaffolding atop the St. Martin-in-the-Fields steeple by Andrew’s friend Robert, who’s a co-director at Eric Parry Architects. For some reason, when I heard we were going to the top of the steeple I thought it meant inside, not outside... It wasn’t as scary as you might think, though, and the views – particularly over the National Gallery and Trafalgar Square – were amazing.
And & Chand are visiting from SF this week. As seems to be the case lately, London has produced a succession of ever more lovely days with which to impress our foreign guests. I'm quite certain that as soon as they depart it’ll turn miserably cold, gray and wet.
After another fine repast at the Fat Badger last night, we retired to our living room for postprandial drinks. Steven & Andrew enjoyed what were perhaps the last of our Alka-Tinis. But then I have no idea whether they even sell Alka-Seltzer over here. Or if they have all the flavors...
This evening I may join the fellas for a site tour of St. Martin-in-the-Fields (which should really be called St. Martin-in-Trafalgar-Square, but the locals are funny about naming stuff). It’s due to reopen to the public on September 30th, so this will really be a sneak-peek preview!
Well, they’re on their own now, and so are we (or should I say I, since Steven’s in Helsinki?). This morning Garry, Nancy, David & Eric jetted off to Glasgow for the last five days of their European Adventure™! We did a LOT of walking, played frisbee across from Buckingham Palace, rode a narrow biddy boat up the Regent’s Canal, got caught up in an emergency evacuation from the Natural History Museum (which at first we thought was part of the Ice Station Antarctica interactive exhibit), hosted a dinner party for visitors from Brooklyn and Detroit, ate a pub lunch in the Windsor Castle’s sunny beer garden, had an, um, adventurous and exciting first day in Paris involving Gendarmes, Pompiers and NO TAXIS (it was, after all, the hottest day of the year), saw some cool art at the inside-out Centre Georges Pompidou, bought the exact same tacky souvenir... TWICE (don’t ask, but apparently came dangerously close to continuing a family legacy), saw Tour Eiffel twinklage (but left the ascent for our next visit), and enjoyed a leisurely dejuner at la Louvre. That’s the abridged version. Oh, and Olive is experiencing withdrawal from the attention and companionship of David and Eric. Check out the pics on Flickr! xx
London is full of these amazing spaces. This one is called the London Bridge Vaults and it’s under the London Bridge overground station. They also call this kind of space “arches” but that seems to refer to less extensive areas. This corridor is about 125 yards long (maybe 80 meters), with cavernous rooms to either side. At one end there's another even more cavernous passageway that's maybe half as long. A group called Shunt stages events here, and this is where our friend Jany had her “Flashdance” birthday party last Friday.
I don't think we've ever occupied the sofas before, so we've never seen this view (looking straight up). BTW, the smoking ban is FABULOUS!
We're in Milan for the weekend. Steven had to attend meetings here on Friday and Monday, so I zipped down to meet him. These are tourists on top of the Duomo. Many more pictures on flickr -- just click on this one and explore my "photostream"!
Patty & Bill stayed at a B&B on this square during their visit to London (the B&B is now closed, and the building appears to be empty). That was a year ago, and these trees had just been severely pruned. I went back in October to check on their progress, and this is what they looked like yesterday...
I know it's cheezey, but I figure somebody might be interested in a couple recent snaps of the furry cuteness.
We spent our Bank Holiday weekend in Amsterdam (where we figured out that this particular "Bank Holiday" is actually Pentecost -- but shhhhhhh! They don't do religion here!). Among the many strange and wonderous things we saw was this gigantic crystal chandelier in the shape of a revolver. AWESOME! Amazingly, if you search for "gun chandelier" on flickr or Google, you won't find any other pictures of this... Seems a little odd to me. The guy who did this also did an enormous ship (which is in the Lloyd Hotel) and a big bomb (only heard about this from Elizabeth Pick but haven't seen it). Searching for the others won't give you any satisfaction either, but you might find some pics of a gummi bear chandelier, which is kind of cool...
Modernist public housing projects ("council estates" or "social housing" over here) are scattered throughout London. Their presence is a good indicator that any given area was pretty much flattened during the Blitz. Maps are generally posted at key public entrances, and vary in design according to the responsible management authority (usually either the local council or a housing trust). The maps are little bits of visual ephemera that I pass regularly, so I thought I would document them and see if anything emerges...
Just so you know what you're looking for... This is the cover of the issue in which my SF article appears.
Steven's "settlement" visa - woo hoo! This means that on the basis of our relationship, Steven is entitled to stay here as long as he likes and do whatever he wants. In a couple more years he can apply for citizenship (and get a UK - i.e. E.U. - passport)!
I hope you all know that if you click on one of these images you get whisked to my flickr site, which has pretty much every picture I take. Nobody has looked at this one, which I thought was kinda pretty, so I'm putting it on the blog. Click already.
In other news, Olive was stricken with a half-closed cloudy eye last Sunday. Googling was too scary, so I made an emergency trip to the vet on Monday morning. He did something with fluorescent dye that reminded me of Danceteria in the 80s. Then he recommended a FIV/FeLV test, which involved ten excruciating minutes in the examination room with Olive and a plastic thing waiting for blue dots not to appear. I couldn't watch and did the crossword instead (thank god it was Monday). The result was negative - whew! - and cipro eyedrops were prescribed. After a week of that and a follow-up visit to the vet, everything seems to be back to normal...
After a couple years in the neighborhood, Steven & I finally paid a visit to Neighbourhood: a great venue with excellent music and a fun crowd. Since it couldn’t be closer to home, we can kiss those $50 weekend cab fares from Soho and Vauxhall goodbye! We say gay-schmay: now, it’s all about the mix.
Today was grey and gloomy. Except right around dusk the sky turned the prettiest shade of lavender.
As I stopped to take this picture, an elderly woman carrying a small painting came up to me on the sidewalk and spoke in a thick accent. I didn't really understand what she was saying at first, so I just said "no thanks." Dumb, huh? Turns out she's 82, hails from Portugal, has a cat named Lucy, and this is her garden. She told me it's no good now because there are no flowers. She's going to take all those boots off the tree, repaint, replant, and rehang them. I'll go back over the summer to check on her progress.
Last weekend we spent 5 days in and around Whitstable, which is an hour and twenty minutes east of London by train. The town is well-known for many things, including native oysters and these beach huts. On Monday morning we learned that artist Margaret Salmon lives there, because there was an article about her in the Independent. Of course, that might be an English Fact.
We were recently having a discussion regarding what constitutes luxury in this country as compared with the USA. I was saying that from a British perspective, everything in America is luxurious because here, luxury is... Matthew finished my sentence: "a chocolate biscuit." Here is proof. In case you can't read the fine print, it says that John Lennon once requested payment in these particular chocolate biscuits instead of money. £7.50 for a tin, btw. I imagine they must be pretty darn luxurious.
From the Chapman Brothers’ excellent show of corrugated cardboard animals at Paradise Row.
Just wanted to toot LB's horn by showing everyone the totally excellent mugs she sent me for my birthday. Cafepress.com - who knew? (as in: "who knew your groovy friends could make such totally excellent stuff there?")
This is Olive sporting her Danish head funnel. TEN DAYS she has to wear that thing. I actually had to go for a more BDSM/Gaultier arrangement since she kept kicking it off and gnawing at her stitches...
I know it's too dark, but this is a picture of Steven's hands filling out his first Checqueue. I think that's how they spell it here, but not totally sure I added enough extra letters. Anyhow, the occasion was a dinner and a show at Bistrotheque to celebrate my birthday.
Yup, this is an ambulance parked outside Monmouth Coffe by Neal's Yard, Seven Dials, Covent Garden, London. Can anyone say “TV series”?
OK, it's Sunday, but they don't have Thanksgiving here so we can be flexible. From left to right: sauce (something garlicky mom made); spinach salad with persimmon and grilled butternut squash; mashed swede (that's rutabaga to you & me) and pear; pumpkin maple pecan pie; the bird (some kind of E.U. heritage award bird that came with quills still in it -- gross! Cooked up tasty, though); roasted carrots, parsnips, sweet & regular potato and shallots; and sausage, chestnut & sage stuffing (made from cornbread I purpose-baked). Not in the picture are gravy and apple-cranberry-rhubarb pie. Jane made canapés. We ate the pie a la mode. Lots of leftovers...
Kristy & I went for a spin around the London Eye around 5pm yesterday. We missed the full-on drama of sunset, but still had a spectacular view of the city lights. This picture is of Waterloo station (kind of vertically striped trapezoid in the upper left). The long thin blueish glowing structure that runs roughly across the middle is the Eurostar terminal, soon to be relocated to King's Cross, with a station at Stratford, site of the 2012 Olympics...
This is the Hall at Christ Church college in Oxford. No floating holiday decorations, though. And they must have turned off the magic ceiling sky picture thingie. But a Harry Potterama nonetheless...
We went to Oxford for the day on Thursday and saw an amazing installation by Daniel Buren at Modern Art Oxford (this is one of four rooms).
This is just a small portion of their New Bond Street Christmas window display...
We discovered this fun fair in Paternoster Square, in the shadow of St. Paul's cathedral. Possibly something to do with the Lord Mayor's Show?
Haven't been down them yet, but these slides are in the Tate Modern turbine hall at the moment.
On Sunday we went to Cleveland Square for Bonfire Night festivities. It's a little creepy that they burn an effigy (though the Yanks were wondering why it wasn't wearing a W mask). But I just read in Watching the English that the practice comes from some pagan ritual and that the effigy is supposed to represent the past year. Well, OK, fine. When the bonfire burned out, they shot off a TON of fireworks. Cleveland Square isn't very big, so the explosions were basically right over our heads and ashes were raining down on the crowd, making it difficult to look up. The verdict was that we would do it again.
That, apparently, is English for "get me out of here!" or "get out of my face!" depending on the situation. Anyhow, HELP! That's what Steven wants to name the kitten, so any appropriate suggestions would be most welcome. At this stage of the game, she's about the size of a large grapefruit and is super duper extra ultra mega totally cute. Very affectionate and sociable. And very smart, I think. My productivity has plummeted. Did I mention how cute she is?
Physically very Alice-esque (so will be tuxedo cat #3 for me, but Steven is having -- surmountable -- issues). In terms of temperament, I think very different from the old girl. But Alice was friendly and gregarious as a youth, so we'll just have to wait & see. Our acquisition of what seems to be a black market kitten was all very hush-hush and on the QT. You have NO IDEA what hoops you have to jump through to adopt ("re-home" here) from the RSPCA or one of the main shelters! So we paid cash and we're keeping quiet about our source. Considered naming her David Banda. Others on the list are Daisy, Mabel, Jade, Vanda -- I won't go on because the list is long. Any ideas would be welcome, though. So far her little life is play, sleep, eat, repeat. When awake doesn't stay still long enough for a photo (at least not one taken with my "multimedia computer")...
We spent a morning in East London last weekend: Hackney, Broadway Market, Shoreditch, Hoxton... This gorgeous bit of graffitti kinda reminds me of some of the good SF art: Nick Ackerman, Rex Ray, et. al.
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