Category Archives: london

Tiger! Tiger! Burning Bright

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Anger fuels the city, the smouldering coals of Blake’s satanic mills are alive and well. Since the attempted carbomb attack on the Tiger Tiger nightclub on Haymarket, I’ve had Blake’s quatrain drumming in my head,

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Though this coincidence with Blake may have been lost on the bombers, it was not lost on me. Some days, London is full of fearful symmetries and awful dichotomies. Yesterday was such a day.

Two blanched-blonde chavs in pink track suits sit behind me on the bus. Their OG mannerisms borrowed from MTV, they listen to tinny hip hop mp3s on their mobiles and call me ginjah (or ginger) pointing to my red dreads with disgust. (It wasn’t until I moved here that I realized many Brits find red hair and freckles ugly and are unashamedly vocal about it– no doubt this is some leftover anti-Irish sentiment. For my American friends who don’t know what I’m talking about, see Catherine Tate’s hilariously illustrative “Ginger Oppression” skit.) The girls hissed at me as I left the bus, white girl respect your race. How is it they don’t realize their entire pose is a borrowed perversion of African American performative resistance?

Alighting in Picadilly, I find vandals got to Madame Pompadour– a dripping pink grimace sprayed over her.

Camilla and Kate convince me to go with them to check out the Damien Hirst show at the White Cube. Outside, people queue in the rain to see the skull, and across the street the gift shop sells tee shirts and posters sprinkled with (ethically sourced?) fairy dust. The guards wear what look like band tee shirts: a screen printed diamond with “hirst” in gothic letters across it. They don’t stop a child climbing on the bisected shark, and I like to think this is not out of laziness but instead knowing that this is ultimately what the thing was for– a morbid, toothy jungle gym. After all, isn’t Hirst the boy who pulled the wings off butterflies and showed you his dissections in the school yard? Now he’s just grown up and has a load of cash.

Walking between the shark sections did make me shudder with a zero at the bone feeling, and the black sheep impeccably stilled in its case terrified me, but all this emotional impact was lessened by the exceedingly bad paintings hung about the place: paint-by-numbers photorealism of his wife’s cesarean, and the garish pathology panels– hair and razor blades affixed to ink jet washes in inchoate art school fashion.

In one alcove a woman stands before the butterfly paintings– wings from tropical butterflies plastered to canvas. She wonders aloud, “where does he get them from?” Isn’t it obvious the whole show is snickering in the face of lifestyle politics and ethical sources– (White Cube’s press releases be damned)? In the other room, the climbing boy stands in front of the black sheep and asks, “Mummy, does he kill the animals himself?” And the mother, so confident in “culturing” her child by letting him climb on the vitrines, is stumped. After a pause she replies, “They are dead, darling.” In other words, don’t worry how they got that way.

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb, make thee?

Later we went to see a screening of Sadie Bennings brilliant German Song and I got homesick. At least in America one is allowed a fertile innocence. But in London, that seems impossible. It was Gay Pride in Soho yesterday, and even with a bomb scare and torrential rain, people came out in carnival beads and metallic latex to drink in the streets with a joyless determination. Blitz spirit, innit? The special bomb units ran through the crowd, and one bumped into me, turned and apologized before running on. I thought– this would never happen in America– a massive street party right after a bomb scare? A policeman under duress saying sorry? For a moment, I was happy to be in such a proud, wildly civil place. I had no idea of the flaming SUV crashed in the airport in Glasgow.

What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

A Plague of Jolly Rogers

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Damien Hirst and “For the Love of God”

Or, What Damien Hirst’s £50 million skull means to me.

I must confess to never really being compelled by Hirst’s morbid insincerity. When I first saw his suspended calf and sheep, “Away from the Flock” and “Child Divided” in Art Forum in the early 90s, I was repulsed. At the time, I was involved in animal rights quite seriously, but also there was something about his glib approach to suffering that put me off. Now that I live in England, I understand them in a new way, as a comment on an English pastoralism that’s now clouded with the nightmare of foot-and-mouth and mad cow disease. Both catastrophes saw the countryside marked with massive burial pits for livestock.

Of course, if one thinks hard enough about something, one can find meaning. This doesn’t make the something art. While I’m usually up for the carnavalesque sensibility conceptual art often offers, I definitely won’t be queuing for tickets to see For the Love of God.

And who’s skull is it anyway? Some poor 18th century sod whose remains ended up in a London taxidermy shop. Apparently Hirst funded the making of the skull himself, which cost over 26 million to make– assuring the public that the diamonds are “conflict free.” In the most facile sense, the skull is a comment on the “you can’t take it with you” cliche. Ultimately, we’re all meat to Hirst, but a few of us have deep pockets, and this is his universe. When I see pictures of him, I just think “slick, cruel dork.” It makes sense that at this time in history someone so culturally impotent would be rich and famous. I’m sure some people think he’s laughing all the way to the morgue, but the only thing I resent is that his deteriorating body of work will continue to be foisted on us, and eventually it will be his own deteriorated body which will become spectacle. Mark my words– there are probably some obscene conditions in his will: his head in a vitrine, set upon by maggots and flies. Instead of A Thousand Years it could be called Fifteen Minutes.

Perhaps in For the Love of God, Hirst finally admits he’s not only mortal, he’s an art-history faddist stumbling after the zeitgeist. I ask you, how many skulls have you seen this week– on cereal boxes and kid’s sneakers, in the windows of H&M and New Look, on movie posters and chapstick and candy? You can’t walk a foot down the high street without being confronted by a skull on something, usually pink and intended for consumption by a 13 year old girl. Pirates are everywhere, and perhaps it’s fitting that Hirst would choose the most played of images to break the bank. He is a pirate, after all.

He’s not the first to decorate a skull– skull oracles, Aztec skull mosaics– Hirst has acknowledged their influence on the current work. But there is also Hirst’s contemporary, Steven Gregory, to consider. Gregory has been creating bejeweled skulls for some time now. Hirst actually wrote an essay for Gregory’s Skullduggery show catalog, and owns many of Gregory’s skulls.

And this is not the first time Hirst has merely taken someone else’s genuine product and turned it into a high-priced stunt. Stuckism, an anti-conceptual art movement, has argued that Hirst stole the idea for his shark vitrine from Eddie Saunders, “fish artist” and electrician who displayed a very similar shark in his Shoreditch shop window years before Hirst paid someone to catch a shark for him. Unlike Hirst, Saunders caught the fish himself. Stuckism’s photos of both works side by side make quite a convincing argument.

The Guardian quotes Hirst as being satisfied with the final object: “To me it seems gentle, quite soft,” he said of the skull. “I would hope that anybody looking at it would get a bit of hope, and be uplifted. We need to line the world with beautiful things that give you hope.”– proof of either his profound disingenuousness or his own numbskulled delusion.

Track Suit City

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When I first came to London 8 years ago, the street fashion excited me. Already the 80′s revival was making a quirky come-back, and the cyberdog candy-borg look was in full swing on the streets of Camden.

Now, London street fashion seems nowhere. Maybe I am just older and more jaded? Or perhaps we can blame it all on the demise of rave culture, or the banning of mushrooms as a harbinger of grim new times. Or blame sky-rocketing rents which drive out anyone who lives a life that allows them to express themselves. Who knows.

Just to make sure it wasn’t my own pessimism, I sought out some London Street Fashion blogs. First I found London Street Fashion, and it just confirmed my dismal conclusions. I understand how much work a project like this must be for the documenter, but that won’t stop me from being critical.

Most outfits featured on London Street Fashion are a combination of grey or brown or black or khaki. All oversized, ripped, drooping, hooded. Camo overload! Basically ugly as hell. The editors clearly have a bent against things femme or colorful. Depressingly, this does seem represent what a lot of people are wearing in London. I won’t use a screen capture because in the site’s words, “they don’t play.” But take a look at the grey-hoodie misery. From looking at this site alone, one might falsely assume that everyone dressed in London is under the age of 25 and thin. I’m assuming this is not an active site, because I believe the “Sloane Square Coming Soon” has been up for a year. The “neighborhood” format limits sightings to trendy, expensive neighborhoods and shopping districts, as if the site has also fallen prey to the post code snobbery so prevalent in the capital. I suppose they are going for a Fruits, Shibuya-style focus, but in London people don’t get dressed up to go shopping, so what’s the point?

However, I then found Style Scout, which reflects the London style I actually admire– the demure, the whimsical and subtly wacky. I recognized a shop girl from Carnaby Street featured there, in her signature pink lipstick and pearls.

And then I came across Savvy London and was rather gleeful. Clearly this (also American) blogger is excited by personal style, regardless of the subject’s age or body type. Risk is admired, and each entry carries a delightfully brief narrative.

But on the whole, London is not very inspiring, street-fashion-wise. I was more impressed with Glaswegian style– girls with Biba-black eyes and vintage tweeds, huge rhinestone brooches– men in fitted trousers and elaborate scarves. There are a few flashes of style I see on the street, mainly in the Sikh community here in Southhall– with the mixing of prints, textures and traditions. Or the art school girls mixing it up in Hackney, or a stray man on the tube wearing some Saville Row masterpiece– but on the whole people are stuck wearing the disposable crap from Primark, etc., and nobody’s trying anything new or different. Second hand shopping and even flea markets are, well, sorry-ass. In the words of Tricia Royal, it’s loathian thrifting here in London.

I’ve come to accept that most of London fashion is decidedly top down– Liberty’s anachronistic styling and new designers like Social Suicide Suits may get the blood going, but it’s out of reach of most Londoners. Let’s face it, by the time most of us have paid rent there’s little left for even modest indulgences, much less playful risks. On the whole, the city seems dispirited, and fashion is a barometer of this (One can trace the takeover of San Francisco by dot-commers, as well as the dot-bomb through street fashion, but I digress).

I am of course looking at it all from the bottom up. I live in W7, a nowheresville post code ghetto of immigrants and laborers, not trust fund art students and socialites. London’s working poor have a strong tradition of defiant style, but as I see it, the look on the street at present is nowhere.

Helsinki, with its playful absurdities, puts London to shame.

…just don’t mention the war…

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Two weeks in Bavaria was definitely not part of the original plan, but things have conspired against us. Through the generosity of our friend Nicky, we have a place to crash in Munich and he’s been showing us around, driving to many Bavarian breweries where I’ve been sampling all the dunkles I can find.

But I must admit I’m weary of sitting around with people who are eating pig knuckles and roasted baby animals. It’s meat, meat meat at every meal. Sometimes meat is the lightest option available on the menu, as the vegetarian stuff is full of butter and cheese. I’ve been living on salty pretzels and beer and now my extremities are swollen from water retention.

Edie is back in the Netherlands, trying to get some work done on the Something’s Brewing piece at the University of Utrecht. Bob and I will be joining her in less than a week. Apparently on her way to Utrecht via train someone threw themselves in front of the tracks. As she was in the first car right behind the driver, she saw the driver go into shock. This must happen a lot, as when M and I were traveling to Vienna someone threw themselves on the tracks and I felt it go “bump”. When this whole piece of Edie’s comes off, in whatever form it takes, it will be an heroic piece of art making, no lie.

Earlier in the week, we trudged up the mountain to Neuschwanstein, the castle which inspired Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” castle in the heart of Disneyland. I’d already been there and I preferred it last time as the winter fog softened its plastic-looking, 19th century edges. There were so many tourists, I bailed on the tour. While everyone else went inside I waited and watched the stream of humans going in and out, many of them American or Japanese tourists in bright, casual clothes that made them look like children– engaging in a second-hand fantasy. All aberrations removed from the fairy tale in favor of the most mundane of happy endings.

Stern conformity still hangs heavy over Munich, despite locals’ insistence that “the past is history” and that Bavaria is part of a tolerant, modern EU state. The uneasy pact with the past is all too present. And this brutal history is all too similar to what it is happening in my own country. In school, history always seemed to stop at the Nazi invasion of Poland– the summer would come before we ever got Korea or Viet Nam.

One person my age I’ve met here said she was too young to remember the war, so why talk about it all the time? But how can I not think about it when my own government cynically uses the holocaust and the “good war” as a metaphor for their bloody and bankrupt foreign policy?

At the start of our visit to Bavaria, were in the little house in Rieder, in the countryside, with my friend Nicky. After the war, this house sheltered men coming home from the front, wanderers lost in the chaos after surrender. We cooked on the wood burning stove and watched a cat stalking through the grass. Everything was green and lush outside. Cows luxuriated in the fields, their bells ringing. Poppies nodded in the wind and I still thought of war. It was impossible to be there and not feel the surreality of peace. I wonder about the ambiguity of this place, so near Dachau– idyllic and terrible at the same time. Nicky is full of stories from the woman, his mother-in-law, who grew up in the country house. She said that after the war you would see all these children running around wearing red trousers. Their mothers had cut up the Nazi flags. Got to use them for something.

Before Edie left, we went to the Haus der Kunst and I was amazed by the architecture– the old glass building was rebuilt in a heavy neoclassical style by Paul Ludwig Troost, according to Hitlers vision (himself a mediocre painter). The iron doors and massive columns support the roof’s clean, soulless planes. Some buildings give themselves away, and insist on the past even through present reinvention– the Haus der Kunst is such a place. Ivy has tried to grow over the surface, leaving dead veins to mark the cold stone– which resembles more a giant mausoleum rather than an art museum. The pictures of the Degenerate Art Show, hung in a corridor by the toiletten, revealed the Nazi’s mythopoesis of hatred. Perhaps one of my fascinations with WWII is that it always seems so shockingly allegorical.

The Haus der Kunst was currently showing Georg Petel’s Baroque sculptures of crucifixions and meaty Saint Sebastians. I peeked at the catalogue and the stuff seemed Mannerist in its purposeful distortions and risks. I would assume he was working from corpses as the tortured bodies of his sculptures were obsessively rendered. I’ve had enough in-your-face-meat to last me for a while, so I skipped out on that and instead sat watching the Gilbert & George video, a preview of their upcoming show which is now at the Tate. It was in English, and as I listened to them finishing each other’s sentences, I was surprised at their sincerity. Why had I thought they would be ironic and distant, speaking in riddles? Gilbert is Italian but has been with George in Spitalfields for 40 years now. They are Londoners, and I understand their work now, more than before, because now I am a Londoner, too. Unlike Munich, London makes room for the passionate eccentric, the willful iconoclast. How I miss it.

Hungerford

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Since moving to London, I have returned to the Hungerford Bridge over and over. I don’t know why I do it, it is beyond choosing.

It could be the name– Hunger– a craving or desire, and ford, a spot in a river where one can cross without losing one’s footing. Hungerford is my insatiable crossing. Hungerford brings the chthonic energy of the tube trains above the river, rumbling beside the spindly pedestrian bridge. It casts colorless light over the black river; the water becomes an opaque mass where nothing floats for long.

I have come to a city where history is dredged. Where a river offers swords and skulls to those who look back. The Museum of London’s prehistoric cases are full of them. Objects thrown to the river to appease it. All violence is sacrificial, especially when it is a means to eat, though we have mostly forgotten this. We consume habitually, without ritual. The banks of the Thames are now littered with the bones of factory farmed chicken, plastic trays and bottles from forgettable meals, Stella cans.

Hunger ford. I walk up the shining steel steps, catching glimpses of lorries passing below. I walk over them, the banister rain-wet, useless, so I bound up. Those descending beside me curse the weather, but I love it. The wind takes me up and over, the rain comes in hard little drops. I could be a ghost returning, re-turning the corner toward familiar water. People bundled and hooded, struggling with umbrellas, pass me. A tourist with the wind at her back takes a picture of the south bank.

In London there is room for musing, room for muses, a public place full of privacy. I’m almost rid of my self-consciousness. No one notices me standing for too long here in bad weather. No one cares.

Moving moody waters, rivers are usually female, like Anna Liffey in Dublin, a forgotten water goddess, grey-green and winding– hair from a Munch vampiress. But the Thames is genderless, defying anthropomorphic reductions.


The river from space– the squiggle from the title shot of East Enders, it punctuates the galleries of the Museum of London, a crooked tattoo by which people place themselves here, burned into my memory as the open-ended sigil on the tube map. The river in my pocket. Memento Mori.

It’s impossible to look into the Thames from the Hungerford crossing and not see death, suicide, sacrifice, endings, as in the Jacques Brell song:
On the bridge of nevermore
They disappear one by one
Disappear without a sound
The desperate ones

On this windy night I stay for too long looking down. A boat loaded with tourists passes beneath at a banal pace, breaking the spell. This ford is mine. None shall pass. You lot! Make an offer– a shilling, a skull, a sword.


(originally blogged on http://velvetdahlia.livejournal.com)