Archive for the london Category

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Cocks and Staches and Stouts

Posted in beer, london, londoners with tags , , , , , , , , , on February 20, 2009 by purlygrrrl
photo by bubbahop on flickr

photo by bubbahop on flickr

Yesterday I went into town to see my friend V for a beer in the City.  It was strange to be back– starker now that most tourists are gone, and perhaps the lay offs have sobered the place, emptied it out? The shadowless St. Paul’s, now diapered in canvas and scaffolding, and Paternoster Square with its big bronze pineapple crowning the concrete fan of pavement– I always feel misplaced there, like the extra that’s wandered on the wrong set or like I’m the apple in a Magritte painting.

While perching by the churchyard, an extremely handsome, well suited man stopped me and asked the way to Paternoster Square– I told him he was almost there, and pointed, but he walked away as I was explaining about the pineapple– which is really the information you need to know you are actually there.  His loss. When people ask me for directions and I actually know them, this makes me feel like a Londoner, almost.

My friend and I met in the Cockpit, our favourite pub on the corner of a little side street.  The place is run by two men with magnificent moustaches and no matter how crowded it is I never have to wait too long to be served. I was amused that last night as I stood at the bar some gentleman called to the landlord, There’s a lady at the bar! I think he was trying to do me a favor but there was a tone of wonder in his voice.  The pub is usually filled with suits, bankers decompressing from the hard work of bringing the entire world to its knees, toasting each other while looking forward to the next day when they can hold all economic recovery hostage to their whims.  But I digress!  The place is painted dark red and decorated with steins and paintings and statues of cocks–  some of it perhaps from when the tiny, circular bar was actually a cockfighting ring.

V and I joked about the vertiginous spiral staircase to the ladies room. After our third (or was it fourth?) round, they were closing up, putting stools on tables.  I ventured up the stairs and as I came down I saw a little door open in the side wall of the flight of stairs– an Alfred Jarry sort of moment (each floor of his flat was cut in half to make another floor)– where the mustachioed proprietor crawled out!  I jumped and said, Ha-llo! to cover my embarrassment and he just looked at me like, Lass– you’re squiffy!

On nights like the last, London seems to say: I love you, why don’t you say it back? And then it goes and takes my favourite necklace of 15 years.  It must have fallen off on the tube. I feel naked without it.

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Hanwell Cinderella

Posted in evidence, london with tags , , on July 23, 2008 by purlygrrrl

If I leave Vagabonds (a goth club near London Bridge) after midnight these are my travel options according to Travel for London.  The last tube is a few minutes after midnight. For a cosmopolitan city, London really does shut up early.  Some clubs like Vagabonds are open until 3, but how do people get home?  I suppose they wander the streets for three hours until the first trains leave in the morning?  When I put in “show me routes with the fewest interchanges” the first return routes began at 5:30 in the morning, even though I put in midnight.  So basically TFL is telling me to stay in the club until 3am and then sit on the banks of the Thames, etc. until 6?  There aren’t even 24 hour diners in London where you can nurse some coffee and greasy eggs at 3am.  If you have a group of friends I suppose you could split a cab, (last time I shared a cab the ride to Hanwell was £75.)  Or brave the night buses as a posse, but as a woman traveling alone it’s just a bit impossible.  The last time I braved the night bus it never showed up.  I waited for over an hour in an abandoned Sloane Square at 2am for the N11 which never came.  I finally hailed a cab which cost me £28.

Better stay home.

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Fat-bottomed girls, they’ll be riding today…

Posted in evidence, london with tags , , , on June 14, 2008 by purlygrrrl

Today, after Kate and I had exhausted ourselves with I Knit’s fab Knit-in-Public-Day Treasure Hunt, we stumbled upon hundreds of naked people riding bikes. Apparently today was also the World Naked Bike Ride which is a protest against oil dependency and car culture. All that was missing was the Queen song.

According to websites and fliers the nakedness serves not only to celebrate “the power and individuality of the human body” but also to raise awareness about cyclists vulnerability in traffic. I have friends who cycle everywhere and they are quite brave. Sometimes even crossing the street in London can be dangerous– drivers often don’t give pedestrians the right of way even when they should legally, and the situation is much worse for cyclists. London runs on anger and aggression and this often shows in the way people drive here.

Watching all the flesh speed past, I was lost in reverie. For a moment I pictured an Amsterdam in London, teeming with bikes! It was a beautiful thought.

Of all the things London can be, it is never really a joyful place, and yet today these protesters seemed gleeful, flirty and free. I wondered, cynically, if they were really Londoners at all.

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Leafing through the streets

Posted in evidence, london, street with tags , , , , on May 2, 2008 by purlygrrrl

Yesterday was May Day, and a lot was going down in London. We started out at Green Park where Space Hijackers, a group of trickster anarchists, were holding a May Day street party to commemorate the forgotten, carnavalesque and radical roots of the day. Some people had dressed up fully OTT– a glittering mermaid did a tailed cheesecake pose for photographers, a tall man sported an abbreviated 18th century gown that showed his suspenders. There were peasants and pirates and a couple V masks. But many people failed to dress up for the occasion– some “cake-eaters” street theatre. They were in lame ironic tee shirts or typical anarchist black hoodie and bandana get ups. I made the effort in a corset, bustle, bloomers and 80′s acid wash bolero– with matching parasol.

I was handed a verbose pamphlet entitled WHAT TO DO IF YOU ARE ARRESTED by a scruffy dude in a brown, moth eaten sweater. Buzzkill. There were more cops and photographers than revelers but they seemed like a fun bunch– even the police were laughing and smiling. I suppose supervising us would be a preferable assignment to, say, dealing with the aftermath of certain football matches. I shared grapes and a pie with some other corseted women and then we were off to a small square– the exact location escapes me. I did notice though that every lane out was lined with cops and they had two vans with them, ready to close in and cart people off. It felt like a set up. Now, cops in Britain (at least after the Thatcher days) are mild and good spirited compared to the armed, robocop looking riot police I was used to seeing at LA demonstrations. Even still, I felt a bit nervous, having never done anything with these organizers. I thought maybe their intention was to get arrested, as there were a cadre of black-hoodied anarchist teens already mocking and baiting the police and it just didn’t seem in the spirit of things. Plus there wasn’t any drumming or musicians– just someone with a boom box blaring dub. I didn’t want to wait around to see what would happen. (Later I met up with some other revelers who stayed for several hours and they said everything went down peacefully– dancing and eating and singing– and they actually felt protected by the large police presence.)

The night before I had gone out with my friend Hadyn to see the greening of the Jack at the Market Porter pub. This Jack-in-the-Green is an old May Day custom, revived in Hastings in the mid 80′s by a troupe of Morris Dancers. The greening started rather late and we were already drunk and ready to go home, but a few people were busy putting leaves and flowers on a wire Jack. Basically, this leafy giant is attended by “bogies” or men in green-man suits, and a troupe of musicians. Everyone gathers around the Jack and goes from pub to pub on May Day, and since the bogie inside the Jack can’t see, everyone must shout directions and help him, and as the day goes on and people get more drunk, this becomes more…interesting.

We met up with the revelers at the Charles Dickens in Southwark. They arrived very late, headed by a guy in a bear suit who proclaimed to us “I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT’S GOING ON” as the band tumbled in, the bogie was helped out of the Jack and everyone started drinking. Again.

(the crazy man in the center with the fresh scab on his face kept trying to follow me into the bathroom at each pub but one of the guys was really graceful and effective in dealing with him.)

I confess I have a thing for the green beards– these men who are willing to embody an archetype and maybe even make a fool of themselves for a day. They all befriended us as if we were one of them, buying us rounds and inviting us to the celebrations in Hastings and telling us about the history of the custom. One bogie shared a swig of single malt out of his silver flask, another bought me a pint of wonderful bitter. And another who played the accordion actually knew something of Portland beer culture! And he we laughed about the looks on all the commuters faces as the Jack-in-the-green swooned down the streets– how surreal and subversive joy can be, especially in black-suited London.

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National Gallery Grand Tour Catalog

Posted in art, blog, london, museums, street, the grand tour on March 16, 2008 by purlygrrrl
National Gallery Grand Tour Catalog, originally uploaded by velvetdahlia.

From the book’s flyleaf:

“One warm(ish) night in June 2007, while most people were tucked up in bed, paintings from the National Gallery were being ‘set free’ in London. The streets of Soho, Chinatown and Covent Garden were turned into an open-air gallery…”

This catalog for the National Gallery Grand Tour captures perfectly the street life of the paintings: “instead of the public seeking out its art, the art sought out its public.” And this was like the dream-scene in Will Self’s Book of Dave, where all the statues in London come to life and flock to Trafalgar Square.

Plus, this blog is quoted (liberally and prominently) in it– which is a thrill.

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Happy Christmas, Dearest Reader

Posted in america, culture shock, london, londoners, music, pagan, pop on December 23, 2007 by purlygrrrl

Christmas in London is a serious affair simply because everything closes. No tube, no buses. No shops or restaurants. The bustling, crowded city turns into a kind of ghost town. Other Americans have said to me, “I always dreamed of a London Christmas” and I’ve often wondered what exactly they meant– surely not the apocalyptic stillness I’ve encountered, having no one to see and no where to go on that day.

There is the argument that Dickens invented Christmas. Perhaps these Americans are thinking of A Christmas Carol– ragmuffins in the snow, conscience-pricking ghosts? Or is it something quaint, mulled and jolly– a received protestant memory? I suppose it’s where the archaic “Merry” comes from in the American “Merry Christmas”– this throwback of an idea. London is the Victorian city celebrating in ye olde stylie. Except it’s not. The only truth in these fantasies is that London at Christmas is a heap of juxtapositions, and maybe that’s why it’s amazing. It’s the one time of year you might have a Londoner smile at you for no reason, and that shopkeeper who you’ve seen twice weekly for years now might just let on that he remembers you. Of course, after the New Year things go back to brisk, slightly hostile anonymity.

Yule has always been my favourite time of year. I love the long nights and in London the nights are even longer. It’s harder to forget the pagan roots of the holiday– the lights and decorations are consolation in the darkness and the bitter cold. There’s less “Happy Birthday Jesus” and more puddings, ales, mistletoe and holly.

It’s easier to avoid the consumer cataclysm in London. I’m sure it exists on Oxford Street, the King’s Road and Carnaby Street, but if you don’t go there you don’t have to deal with it. If you do have to go to a store you’re more likely to hear a bizarre (to my American ears anyway), new-wave take on Christmas: Wham, Band Aid or even the Plastic Ono Band and Wizzard instead of the same schmaltz you’d hear in American retail establishments. Less Chipmunks and more Fairytale of New York.

And there’s something modest about the celebrations. As far as I can tell the big festivity here is the office party, and barring that, the coach ride to see relatives. Last night I was at our local pub and there was a table of celebrants having roast dinner. They all wore paper crowns (save two killjoys who took themselves too seriously. I believe you can judge the character of a person based on whether they are willing to wear the paper crown.). They read each other the stupid jokes out of the crackers which they pulled with childish glee, even though the lot were middle aged.

But there is the bizarro mirror, of course– being an expat here I see the British indulge in a Yank-style Christmas with I kind of sardonic guilt– it’s full on Hollywood romantic comedy, credits rolling over Louis Armstrongs’ It’s a Wonderful World. (The film Love, Actually kind of sums up this adaptation in a horrifying way.) Today two Radio 6 DJ’s I love to hate– Russel and John– played christmas music as they got drunk on cider and rose petal vodka this morning. And they played typical Yank Christmas songs, snarking all the way but still loving it, probably because they were opening gifts that contained even more alcohol. Damn if I didn’t get all warm and fuzzy, too. Especially when they played the atypical Ramone’s Merry Christmas, I Don’t Want to Fight Tonight. *sniffle*

But then, this time of year, almost anything sets me off, a song, a string of lights, a commercial for an ipod, even.

So today, after listening to Christina’s brilliant Xmas song, Things Fall Apart, I went for an astringent walk down the canal near my flat– frost-speckled webs drawn across the skeletal vegetation, only the thorns were left clinging to the frozen bank. The fog was so thick and ghostly, it blanked everything out– every tinselled sentimentality.

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Mulaika and her Capecho shrug

Posted in london, londoners, londonstyle on November 13, 2007 by purlygrrrl

Mulaika and her Capecho shrug, originally uploaded by velvetdahlia.

I met Mulaika at the Stitch & Bitch London day. Not only does she look amazing, but she knit this herself.

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Fall into the Craic

Posted in art, london, museums, salcedo, shibboleth, tate on October 17, 2007 by purlygrrrl

Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

-Judges 12:5-6

Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth replaces the “fun for the whole family” Unilever slides in the Turbine Hall at the Tate.

The installation is dramatic and strange and at first I thought it a bit too facile in terms of its metaphors– a visual pun on “ground breaking” and “shaking the foundations” of the museum.

But then I thought about the name– which, depending on how you pronounce it, could cost you your life– according to a story in the Hebrew Bible.

When I was in school being taught King Lear by a Scot, I marveled at her pronunciation of Gloucester. It’s glosster not glawchester, she corrected me. She was a snob who hated James Joyce. And she also would say “If you can’t spell or pronounce a word correctly, it’s not yours to use” which was essentially silencing a good number of her students. I think she liked it that way.

Living in London as an expat I’m continually reminded that I pronounce things wrong. Now that I live here, I often mumble names if I have not yet heard them aloud, hoping to buy some time until I hear exactly which consonants are swallowed, which vowels are stretched, etc. And of course there are shared words that I must say in my own way, no matter how damning my own accent. How astitute that Salcedo would top off her subversive installation in the land of Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle with this title.

Moving here has taught me another “otherness”– I am from a colonized nation, though a remote one that has now become the colonizer. How do you say disorienting? Ok, now say it with a mouth full of marbles.

Salcedo’s piece is serious and angry. Heavy. But there is also something hilarious about it. Watching people follow the fracture up the floor, all peeking as if they are looking for some secret treasure, the point of it all, the inner workings of the Oz of the art world.

I have to admit what I loved most about it were the signs installed by the museum which warned people to watch their step and mind their children. The crack is just the right size for a foot, a hand or a child’s head to get wedged in and stuck there. In an age where museums pander to children to the point of the shamelessness and garish simplicity, it’s nice to see something so small– so seemingly banal– and dangerous.

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Nearer the Record Bin of History

Posted in fopp, london, monoculture, music, pop on August 5, 2007 by purlygrrrl

I met my husband in a used record store where he worked on Hollywood Boulevard. That store isn’t there anymore.

In high school I used to go to a record store regularly with my first real crush. We would drive out to some other suburb and pour over the bins in this little red-walled hole. I could only afford maybe one record at each visit, so it had to be the right one. I picked out things like The Smiths, which disappointed my friend. He took pity on me and made me mixed tapes. But a record never really made me cool. It was such a luxury, an object I could bond with. I’m sure that little shop in the badlands of the Chicago suburbs is gone now, too.

I’ll admit I was spoiled by the grand Ameoba Music store in San Francisco and Los Angeles. (Where the guy at the electronic counter would actually set things aside for me like Hecate and Ove-Naxx with a secretive glee– no one in London would ever break out of their numb-cool pose to do that.)

Shopping for music in London is shit. The Virgin Megastore is this tourist hell of eviscerated top-down marketing. The Oxford Street HMV cavern broadcasts billboard-sized videos of the geriatric Stones flailing around silently, overlayed by the most recent Justin Timberlake or Gwen Stefani or what have you. All the employees have to wear shirts that say “HERE TO HELP” in giant pink letters and every one of them is soured by this lack of dignity, spending a lot of time sculpting their hair so they can at least look indie-vidual on top. Looking at the displays, where everything’s a “bargain”, you feel like all of London is listening to the same five records and you can’t even blame the radio now– people are actively subscribing to the monoculture.

And there’s Sister Ray in Soho– sad, sad, sad. I’ve gone in there asking for things and always get the same vague sneer. I mean, how dare they when really their store only offers things like the Pixies back catalogue and Baby Shambles tee shirts. Like a fucking bargain basement of indiesease. No Metric? No Frog Eyes? Not even any Sons and Daughters? What’s wrong with you, Sister Ray?

There was Fopp, which I loved (for Americans, it had a bit of the early 90′s Tower Records wacky stock about it), even if it was hunt and peck, outside of Rough Trade it was the best London had. As of a few weeks ago, it is gone, every store. (The one Cambridge Circus location will reopen in name only, owned now by HMV.)

Economic analysts are blaming music downloads for these closures, but I’m not buying it entirely. (From Fopp’s now-dead website: “Our store chain is profitable, well regarded and loved by our loyal customers and staff. However we have failed to gain the necessary support from major stakeholders, suppliers and their credit insurers to generate sufficient working capital to run our expanding business.”) Blame boredom and greed– a handful of corporate culture-makers saturating everything with their own perverse choices, categorizing cultural production into demographic consumables.

I looked at the squawking image of Mick Jagger dwarfing me in HMV and thought yeah– Jack-the-Lad 60′s boomers– you’ve done it, clinging to your now-linty cool-points, you own everything. My generation has had to invent itself in their shadow. I had my day, my secret joy of dusty-record-bin discovery. At least I know it’s over. In “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung” Lester Bangs writes about buying a new record:

...The real story is rushing home to hear the apocalypse erupt, falling through the front door and slashing open the plastic sealing “for your protection,” taking the record out– ah, lookit them grooves, all jet black without a smudge yet, shiny and new and so fucking pristine, then the color of the label, does it glow with auras that’ll make subtle comment on the sounds coming out, or is it just flat utilitarian monochromatic surface, like a schoolhouse wall…And finally you get to put the record on the turntable, it spins in limbo a perfect second, followed by the moment of truth, needle into groove, and finally sound…

I won’t say I don’t miss it.

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Them Be the Bells of Bow, Yo.

Posted in appropriation, cooptation, estate agents, gentrification, london, pop, street on July 12, 2007 by purlygrrrl

There’s this song that’s still at number two here in the charts and it sums up everything I hate about British pop music right now. They play it all the time on BBC 6 and now it’s stuck in my head. Kate Nash’s Foundations– OK, so she’s cute– much cuter than Lily Allen whose tough-girl pose is really tedious. Even the guy in the video is cute. The sock fight– nauseatingly cute.

If you want to see the video, go here as none of the YouTube links work. (To watch the video on her oh-so-quirky-cute site you have to give up an email, name and phone number and even an address I think. INSANE. but let’s move on.)

Nash’s song is better than any I have heard from Allen but she’s basically an Allen clone. She’s taken Allen’s game and bettered it for the 20-something-new-mortgage-from-daddy demographic, whereas Lily Allen was aimed at teenage girls who don’t remember white reggae from the first time around in the 80′s. Nash’s demographic actually has some money to spend, so, even though she’s a MySpace success story, maybe the A&R people are honing their game.

On the web many sites claim Allen and Nash are Cockney and that’s just rubbish. Neither were born within the sound of Bows Bells, if we’re going to get purist about it. Nash is from Rickmansworth, a north west suburb of London. And Allen was born in West London to a film producer an actor. I would like to say that accent is put on for the American market, but their songs are hits here.

It can only mean that Brits want to see themselves in a certain way– a juxtaposition of worldly wit and (pastoral throwback?) innocence with a sprinkling of East End grit (More akin to Dick Van Dyke tap dancing than any pearly king). The fashion for faux Cockney accents is a sure sign that it no longer refers to a specific people and culture, but a fiction. Kind of like in the current popular imagination, pirates are no longer sailors who raped and robbed people but ragamuffin swashbucklers with sexy eye makeup.

But it does seem the best way to be a pop star in Britain these days is to pretend you are Cockney. (though this can work even if you are a duo from Detroit) white stripes

It’s ironic. The East End, now totally gentrified, has become the bastion of the trendy, edgy and wealthy few who have pushed out the poor there so what remains is a mythology.

Something’s dead, gone, changed in London, even if there’s no real pointing to the Cockney mask per se, which Peter Watts refers to as “Mockey”. Hence the weird theme of nostalgia that crops up in so much white British hip hop. There are many examples but I’m thinking of Lady Sovereign’s “Those Were the Days.” where she’s wistful about her days growing up on the Chalkhill estate. Unlike the others I mention above, she actually did grow up on an estate, even if it was also in the west.

It becomes even more poignant when you realize she she’d be priced out of London if she weren’t a pop star.

And here Jamie T’s “Sheila” featuring the actor Bob Hoskins who is famous for playing Cockneys among other things. Here he is lipsynching the song with his scary white teeth. This is actually one of the worst videos I’ve seen in a really long time and it pretty much ruined the song for me.

And, though it’s not hip hop, I love Pulp’s nostalgic “Mile End” It’s old at this point, and recontexualized in Danny Boyle’s brilliant Trainspotting. I have no idea if what the song refers to was closer to reality than the faux-grit on the charts now. I have heard that it is about Jarvis Cocker’s first “home” in London, but I’m sure it too is creating a myth of a gritty London up for grabs, a London for anyone. (Not just a city of estate agents and property-ladder climbers, but anyone who could find a vacant corner, anyone who could live low rent — make art or music or write. Anyone who could tend to the city’s soul, but I digress.) In a lot of ways the city of this song, or the vision of London in Kureshi’s London Kills Me or even the parallel vision of Edinburgh in Trainspotting is more hopeful than this London I live in now that is doing so “well” if you believe the hype, a London that’s polished and primed, the richest city in the world, full of high street chains.

Now there are headlines about interest rates closing out first time buyers from the “property ladder.” But all this talk of building new homes on brown sites is too little too late. We didn’t have no where to live, / we didn’t have nowhere to go / til someone said /I know this place off Burditt road…

This new hegemony of the estate agent has made me wistful for squats. Maybe I should work on my Cockney accent and write a pop song about it.

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