Sunday 25 March 2007

I'll wait here once again

Diamond Geezer is frequently good reading - and sometimes he just goes ahead and writes the post I was going to write. Just a link for you then - Stratford has a Starbucks now??



(I'm a fence-sitter on the subject of major multi-national coffee chains. I see the arguments against, but at the same time, independent coffee shops are not falling over themselves to give me the option of sitting somewhere that's not a pub, chatting with a friend at ten in the evening. I figure that I'm not paying £3 for a coffee, I'm paying £3 for the place to sit and natter that isn't a pub full of loud drunks. I think that's worth it. Of course the new local is open more or less while I'm at work, so won't be getting my custom, but when and if they start offering me that essential service, I won't complain.)

Thursday 22 March 2007

in a rich man's world

Need a one-stop-shop for coverage of yesterday's budget? Intute and LSE Library oblige.



[as I flipped past the news last night, the presenter was laboriously explaining the 'the Gord giveth and the Gord taketh away' pun used in several headlines. There is something quite wrong about the fact they felt the reference needed explaining. The image of Gordon Brown with a long flowing grey beard will, however, haunt me for a while.]

Wednesday 21 March 2007

Such a horror, oh such a farce

Jump at the Peacock Theatre this evening. This is me grinning. Still.



I have to confess that I didn't think it was quite as hysterical as I'd been lead to believe, but it was a lot funnier and more impressive than their taster at the Sadler's Wells Sampled, and I had a really good night.



Both the stage craft and the technical skills were right up there. (except some of the staff work, which was patchy in places). It's very physical humour, which isn't always my thing, but it's riffing off more Hong Kong Specials than you can shake a stick at, which is a plus to me.



It does come with an audience participation warning, though, which kind of spoiled things a bit for me, as I can't quite get past my anxiety-by-proxy when people are hauled out of the audience and (potentially) humiliated on stage.



But once we were past that, the final scene with the burglars, was utterly *brilliant* - character, comedy, tricks, finesse. They deserved every second off the applause, and probably more.



Definitely a good evening's entertainment, and one that was all the better for being enjoyed with a big group of friends. If it hadn't been a week night it would have been an excellent precursor to a longer night out. (As it was someone stood outside taking deposits on assorted martial arts classes would have made a killing!)



In other news : the lineup for Breakin' Convention 2007 has gone up. choices choices ...

Tuesday 13 March 2007

coming for to carry me home

Yesterday morning I came home to London by plane. I've never flown over the city that low, or when the weather was so clear, and it was amazing to be able to see the centre of the city laid out like a familiar map. The Thames really *does* look like the Eastender's title card, for one thing.

Maybe it's having spent a day recently peering at maps, but I was able not just to pick out the bridges and the Houses of Parliament and which park was which, but also to check that my workplace was still standing (1) The new Wembley arches really stand out in all that mass of north west housing, too!

I got a bit lost once we were west of that, until, nearly at Heathrow, I got a glimpse of a silver tube train rocking along the route I'd be taking back home.

It's good to be back.


(1) Other people do do that, right? When you've been away, and you come back and see your house for the first time, and you think 'not burned down - that's good'. No? Just me then. Huh.

Wednesday 7 March 2007

Another map of your head

I spent part of Friday evening mooching around the National Portrait Gallery, using it's late night opening to pass the time before my evening's engagement.

The Pet Shop Boys mini-show that was on its last weekend was a bit uninspiring, being mostly very well known shots, but elsewhere in the contemporary galleries there were several new-to-me pieces that I was very taken with (and I always love visiting Andrew Motion's Head - it's so tactile.) As is so typically me, the portrait of Johnson Beharry, which I really liked, isn't on their site, so I can't follow up the reference to a related painting I now can't remember any of the details about (something about a cavalry officer?)

Up on the first floor, you're immediately faced by a wall of Jim Dine's self-portraits - I have to admit I was very taken by a pair, one very dark black and red, full of anger, and then next to it, an etched silver-under-black version that somehow reminded me of ancient gods. The Exceptional Youth set, both sides of one bay of the curved dividers, also grabbed me - beautiful images, but also very narrative, somehow.

Rounding the corner from that first floor gallery I was forcibly reminded how much I love how the NPG uses it's space to orient you - the clean, contemporary, late 20th / 21st century new acquisitions, all curved beech and glass, and then you turn a corner and it's ox-blood walls, gold frames, and Victorians ... The dotty glass dividers in the earlier 20thC gallery pleases me also - and the current focus on women writers was fascinating - so many familiar names and so few familiar faces.

But the hands-down winner for me was Nick Danziger's Blair at War series, which manage to be both documentary, aesthetic, and powerfully moving. There's one shot that could be the image of a dispossessed leader - TB to one side, being made up for the cameras, while the foreground is filled with his staff and advisers, deep in confab. Put next to the shot of TB and Bush, chatting casually on the terrace at Camp David, deciding the course of the war, though, it's just the opposite.

And then I spent Saturday afternoon with a friend braving the closing weekend crowds for the London: A Life In Maps exhibition at the BL. All those reviews when it opened that said it was brilliant? They were quite right, but it's too late now. There were an awful lot of people, and as the maps all pretty much demanded you to get up close and personal to spot road names and landmarks, there were some traffic snarls, but pleasingly, the kind of people who seem to want to spend a chunk of their weekend getting their geek on about the evolution of London place names also seem to be quite friendly and happy to point things out / have things pointed out to them.

It was striking how unrecognisable so much of the pre-Wren city is, not helped by the centre point of many of the maps being Southwark Cathedral / London Bridge, which on a modern map are over to the east. And disconcerting how, in the early maps, you can see the back of London - the point to the North where the houses end. I know it's facing the other way, but I couldn't help remember standing in front of Alexandra Palace on fireworks night last year and seeing the city stretch south into the horizon...

We were going to follow up with a trip to The Building Centre, but we lost track of time both in the exhibition and over coffee, so they were shut by the time we got over there. Another day.

Thursday 1 March 2007

Sometimes it's hard / It's hard to tell

I nipped over to the Proud Gallery in my lunch break today, to take a look at their new exhibition : The Sims Life Stories : The Art of the Teen Dilemma.



It was just about worth fifteen minutes of my day, and it wouldn't have been if I'd got rained on on the walk over there. It's glorified advertising, and I've come to expect better of Proud Galleries, who normally do a fabulous job of blending the aesthetic and the commercial.



Maybe I'm being unfair.



By juxtaposing screencaps of the new Sims with blown up images from girl's magazines from the last fifty years, they're clearly not going for the aesthetically engaging, more the sociological angle, but even so it's just not as interesting as they seem to think it is.



The problem is that it's not *hard* to find photo-stories and comic strips in which teenage girls (1) are shown being insecure and obsessed with boys and make-up and what their BFF really thinks of them, so what does the exhibition think it's saying? The more things change the more they stay the same? Maybe. Probably.



But the heavy dollop of branding doesn't lead you to question or conclude or react to that, it just says 'and now we can do the stilted poses and predictable dialogue without needing to photograph models.' which leaves me with a overwhelming feeling of 'and?'



The press release is peppered with words like 'legendary'
'unprecedented', 'cumulation of the evolution of storytelling'. It's
really not helping me be impressed.



When you think of the actually kind of nifty things people do with the Sims, this exhibition just seems like even more of a let down. (Having Depeche Mode re-record a song in Simlish? Good advertising-meets-art, IMO. This? not so much.)



On the plus side, it's only a two week exhibition, so it'll be over soon.





(1) In fact - that's part of why I found it more infuriating than anything else - they're conflating 'teenager' with 'girl' - at a guess because the Sims is a 'girl game'? (I wouldn't know - I'm more of a Rez / GTA girl m'self) Even when they've picked a comic or photo-story about boys, it's actually about the girl he stood up to work on his boat, or the girl he fancies but can't talk to, or the lass who's been holding an exaggerated cheesecake pose in her bikini for the last couple of hours while, unbeknownst to her, he draws her...





Technorati Tags:

this mutt is not the greatest of his worries

This discussion 'through' Neil Gaiman's blog about librarianship, and intellectual freedom and scrotums/scrota is a pretty good example of why the love mentioned in Neil's post is reciprocated in the case of this particular librarian.



I'm not American, so I'm not ALA, but I am CILIP, and the principles still apply.



(If it's not obvious from the link above what discussion I'm talking about, try the , , and labels)