340 Factorial incidence of londinense reflection for the queen tropiques med°ley |
|
Dear Prudence, ... en statue of mow-shun, still/en core ... tout blurred together to gather ... 1st 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.» 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. 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. 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. Finished The Peregrine by J.A. Baker. It becomes not so much about peregrines as what in them we observe in ourselves ... anthropomorphically speaking.
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.
Baker pushes himself to the threshold wherein he almost eats a kill just to know what it's like.
... '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. If u must go to work tomorrow, well if i were you i wouldn't bother ... ... the air sublimating to condensation on the windows only to vaporize instantaneously. The sun ever low on the horizon. 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. Poi flâneured past holiday window displays in Kensington or quelque part south of Hyde park ... becoming ourselves part of the human diorama. As in most places, advertisements & cars ruin the aesthetic of the city, perhaps moreso in London than other places. Tourists are money! Difficult to find angles appealing to the eye, the right dented incidence. Hard left to avoid kitschy wax museum wank ... at times reality reassembles bad webbed design ... glittery MySpace pages. And to add to it the hordes of touristes & widespread saturation de personnes... 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 ... 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. 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. 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. Sommes allés a some Belgian place, Belgo, where we met Scott Bradfield for a quick drink (the 1st time in meatspace). After we ate downstairs in a massive cavernous basement that felt like a factory for feeding faceless Disney characters. Then to the ICA bookstore (bought Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques) & had a drink in their bookstore (gallery was closed). 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. Wake up, rinse, repeat. 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. 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. 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 1st 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.
... 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. Lévi-Strauss's observations are far from quotidian & superficial:
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.
|
|
>> NEXT: How How We Became Posthuman becomes us, man ... infinitesimally | |
[ com.Posted 2013 derek
white | calamari press ] |