«I wanna see some of history, cuz now i got a reasonable economy. Now i got a reason ...»

Dear Prudence,

... en stat^ue of mow-shun, still/en core ... tout blurred together to gather ... 1^st night in London peregrinated 2 Belgravia in searching 4 restraunt-pub we membered seeing on a priori trip ... tout too p.o.s.h, rich foreign elements taking over Londres. Ended up eating requisit fish & chips at randum pub near Victoria stay-shun. «Fucking reeks uv piss don't u think?» asks the bloke standing at the long trough w/ us. «Wasn't gonna say nothing, but glad u agree.»

4D is a bled

All the pubs in London seem to have the same menu ... comme si catered by 1 big Kraft-ish food servize. Got the 'Codfather' ... washed down w/ bland ale. Why is it lifts & publick space in UK smells of farts ... on account of the beer? Not even like their ale's that gassy ... tastes gasless & tasteless to our buds, little better than water.

room w/ a view ... «waiting for the angels of Avalon, waiting for the eastern glow»

Next day while j was lunching w/ The prince we chowed a spicy chicken tikka wrap off the street (Strutton Ground to be xact) ... then strutted cross the bridge to Lambeth, back across & up Vauxhall. Dined at Tozi ... Venetian tapas. Lots of Italians here, both tourists & working in restraunts. Il semble que u hear more italian, spanish & french here then u do english.

«now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall»

Nelson Mandela died. All's going to hell in a handbasket in the Congo. In Rome, a circus elephant wandered round the streets lost for a few hours. Thailand's government nonchalantly dissolved encore & Lenin got decapitated. In the UK all sorts of courtroom drama regarding Saatchi's ex ... not sure why buzz-feeding paparazzi are named for italians when Brits are king of such tabloid gossip.

«I find no interest in the racks & shelves, just 10,000 reflections of my own sweet self, self, self ...»

Finished The Peregrine by J.A. Baker. It becomes not so much about peregrines as what in them we observe in ourselves ... anthropomorphically speaking.

«Fear releases power. Man might be more tolerable, less fractious and smug, if he had more to fear. I do not mean fear of the intangible, the suffocation of the introvert, but physical fear, cold sweating fear for one's life, fear of the unseen menacing beast, imminent, bristly, tusked and terrible, ravening for one's own hot saline blood.»

pair of peregrines in the Natural History Museum

Baker becomes increasingly jaded & alienated from the human species. As mentioned in the last post, the hunter becomes what he hunts ... in observing, he loses track of himself as observer ... 'I' morphs to we.

«In a lair of shadow the peregrine was crouching, watching me, gripping the neck of a dead branch. We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life. We shun men. We hate their suddenly uplifted arms, the insanity of their flailing gestures, their erratic scissoring gait, their aimless stumbling ways, the tombstone whiteness of their faces.»

impressionable gold-leafed road kill

Baker pushes himself to the threshold wherein he almost eats a kill just to know what it's like.

«Only the head, wings, and legs, were untouched. All other bones had been carefully stripped of flesh. What was left smelt fresh and sweet, like a mash of raw beef and pineapple. It was an appetising smell, not the least bit rank or fishy. I could have eaten if myself if I had been hungry.»

leafing a lasting impression

... 'raw beef & pineapple,' makes me fa fame leggerlo. Running in Hyde Park in the cold, get back to the room & u can smell a certain electricity, like ozone, mixed w/ sweat ... holding a charge, a solid-state capacitance.

1 of many glass & metal complexes

If u must go to work tomorrow, well if i were you i wouldn't bother ...

linear arrangement

... the air sublimating to condensation on the windows only to vaporize instantaneously. The sun ever low on the horizon.

fractured arrangement pris^om

Went to the Royal Geographic society where j wuz attending some lectures ... sat in for a while, then to the nearby Natural History museum ... disappointing as far as dioramas & whatnot ... the general aesthetics of how they display such taxidermied objets.

spare dinosaur ribs (Natural History)

Poi flâneured past holiday window displays in Kensington or quelque part south of Hyde park ... becoming ourselves part of the human d^iorama.

«As the flames rose, to her Roman nose & her hearing aid started to melt»

As in most places, advertisements & cars ruin the aesthetic of the city, perhaps moreso in London than other places. Tourists are money!

«he can't be a man cuz he doesn't smoke the same cigarrettes as me»

Difficult to find angles appealing to the eye, the right dented incidence. Hard left to avoid kitschy wax museum wank ... at times reality re^assembles bad webbed design ... glittery MySpace pages. And to add to it the hordes of touristes & widespread saturation de personnes...

«She lives in the place in the side of our lives where nothing is ever put straight. She turns her self round & she smiles & she sez "this is it, that's the end of the joke"»

Towards evening met David Winters & Julie Reverb in Soho for Indian, then to some basement speakeasy where u cood hang past 11. Good to see such charming people in meatspace.

«just a sprinkling for the maid queen»

The pub scene in Soho ever crowded & boisterous. I've got no right to take my place in the human race ... & now I know how Joan of Arc felt.

p.o.v. from the taxi home

Found ourselves hearing Smith's lyrics all week ... if not now, when? ... it owes me a living ... if a double-decker bus kills the both of us ... meet me by the cemetary gates. Seems you can find a line for any occassion. 

«colors clash, it's a mess of souvenirs, there to remind you, telling the time»

Back in cyber-space, Bookmunch reviewed The Becoming & Elizabeth Mikesch's Niceties. About The Becoming they said: «... ah, the release from those semantic chains is like taking a shower in the bush with only the monkeys for company ...» ... which we'll take out of context as a compliment.

«Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust»

«I see people turn their heads & quickly look away, like a newborn baby it just happens everyday»

December 8, 2013. Yesterday went to the Tate. Actually before that went to the Hayward Gallery & saw stuff by Ana Mendieta (for the most part gratuitous self-documentation) & Dayanita Singh—an artist we noticed at the Venice Bienniale a few years ago & wanted to see more.

archives captured by Dayanita Singh

Met David Winters & Julie Reverb again, but their slot to go in the Tate was an hour before us, so we went to Borough Hall to get something to eat. It was mayhem & lines too long to get the grilled cheese we had our tongues set on, so settled for a chicken sandwich. You'll always find us out to lunch ...

south bank approaching Borough Hall (w/ The Shard in background)

soap bubble floating in front of The Tate

Then to the Paul Klee exhibit at the Tate, met back up w/ David & Julie. Good retrospective in chronological order (helps that Klee meticulously & systematically catalogued his pieces) ... could really get an idea of the range & evolution of his work.

Paul Klee—Birds & Islands

elsewhere inside the Tate

David & Julie had to leave after ... we continued on to the Mira Schendel exhibit ... again, a good chronological survey showing her evolution from simple geometric designs to intricate textual pieces.

hanging Mira Schendels

billboard forget where

lettered arrangement ... «it's just a shot away»

Then wandered back across the Millennium bridge to the Sir John Soanes museum ... this house full of looted Greek & Roman architectural elements & other pilfered bric-a-brac.

St Paul's as reflected from the Tate

«take it to the wall ... to be hung, on the wall ... to be viewed by all ... a tribute in the grand hall»

burying St. Paul

Sommes allés a some Belgian place, Belgo, where we met Scott Bradfield for a quick drink (the 1^st time in meatspace). After we ate downstairs in a massive cavernous basement that felt like a factory for feeding faceless Disney characters.

exhibit #70—«see the cracked reflection, standing still»

Then to the ICA bookstore (bought Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques) & had a drink in their bookstore (gallery was closed).

iNT. ICA

Then to another pub on Strutton Ground & a nightcap in our hotel listening to some Jazz band. Might have been another pub or 2 along the way.

nondescript street features

Wake up, rinse, repeat.

«When the levee breaks, I'll have no place to stay»

Next morning peregrinated north thru Marylebone, up to Regents park where we met Scott Bradfield & his dog Misty for lunch. Walked w/ him back towards Charing Cross, poked around in some bookstores, got Morissey's autobiography. Had a pint of Guinness, saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand walking through the streets of Soho in the rain. Ate bad Italian near our hotel on Victoria street.

«she ain't no human being, there is no future & England's dreaming»

J had a final meeting the last morning, up near the London school of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Went straight from there to Paddington, Heathrow express to the airport ... Virgin Atlantic to JFK.

L.L.T.T.

Caduveo belles in Sad Tropics

On the plane read Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss ... an anthropologic travelogue, set mostly in India & the Amazon & the doldrums getting there. Even Lévi-Strauss (1 of the 1^st westerners to visit some of these Amazonian tribes he studied)—back some 80 years ago when they still travelled by steamship—laments the corruption of the world by virtue of our seeing it.

«Then, insidiously, illusion began to lay its snares. I wished I had lived in the days of real journeys, when it was still possible to see the full splendour of a spectacle that had not yet been blighted, polluted and spoilt [...] And so I am caught within a circle from which there is no escape: the less human societies were able to communicate with each other and therefore to corrupt each other through contact, the less their respective emissaries were able to perceive the wealth and significance of their diversity.»

«big ol' jet airliner» or «big armchair with the light on»?

... a harking for the good old days that we've lamented plenty in our own travels, that even Lucretius pined for in B.C. times. It just wasn't like the old days anymore. And here we are still rutted in this vain loop of seeking the exotic ... not that we are traveling right now anywhere remotely exotic or sadly tropical.

... back in snowy NYC

Lévi-Strauss's observations are far from quotidian & superficial:

«I have learned that the truth of a situation is to be found not in day-to-day observation but in that patient and piecemeal process of distillation which the linguistic ambiguity suggesting the idea of a perfume perhaps encouraged me to practice in the form of a spontaneous pun, the vehicle of a symbolic interpretation that I was no yet in a position to formulate clearly.»

in particular he studies the tribal body markings of the Caduveo people in great detail. It is in these abstractions & their differentials that we should be seeking exotic truths.

«The search for the exotic boils down to the collecting of earlier or later phases of a familiar pattern of a development.»

face painting motifs/motives