Vanity Fair was better in the Twenties

There's an exhibition of Vanity Fair portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. The early ones are the best.

St Martin's Weirdness

I saw this in the St Martins College windows on Tottenham Court Road. Maybe it's a good thing these chaps are moving their college to Kings Cross.

Lift art

She and Her have created a performance art installation in the two wooden cupboards in the elevators at Greenwich Foot Tunnel. It's about a moment shared between two women in the tunnel. The strangers swap coats and then wordlessly go on their way.

The London Marathon is 26.2 miles long

This is the key thing I failed to note before I entered the race. And 26.2 miles is a long way.

The queue for the loo in Greenwich Park before the start. 30,000 nervous bladders.

The big screen was made for this film

Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) is playing at the BFI Southbank til 27 March as part of their 'Twilight and Treachery: The Post-War European Film Noir' season. It's utterly the most beautiful film I've ever seen, and really deserves to be seen in a proper cinema.
Every single shot is beautifully composed, every prop adds to the film, every walk-on a character in their own right. At one point, the professor in it says that no really serious person is ever serious. It's kind of true of the film, because it's witty and silly the whole way through and yet deadly serious.
Admittedly, the BFI Southbank is quite arty tosser heavy, but it's worth it for this film.

More than just pissoirs

The Duchamp, Man Ray and Picabia exhibition at the Tate Modern is a good value economy-pack 3 for the price of 1 type exhibition. 12 rooms, 3 artists - that works out at a room a pound. Probably about 10p per exhibit. You can't knock that.
In order of funniness:
1. Man Ray.
2. Duchamp.
3. Picabia.
Man Ray also wins the title for randomness and wierd obsessions. Have a look at his 'carving chess pieces' phase. And then there's Duchamp's alter ego Rrose Sélavy, which quite inspired me to work on my alter ego. Finally the best bit was Man Ray's telegram to his friend of 40 years, Picabia, as Picabia lay on his deathbed. It just read:
‘A bientot, cher Francis – Marcel’.

The Great Trafalgar Square Freeze

I'm not sure I agree with London copying New York in such a blatant way. Still, you cant gripe too much about such commitment to pointless silliness. It's a step forward from flashmobbing, though I'm not sure facebookmobbing has such a ring to it.

London needs this

In New York, if you see reusably junk on the street, you can just snap a picture on your phone and send an SMS to Garbage Scout. As good as Freecycle is, this would be even better.

The price of graffiti on Portobello Road

£208,100 apparently if it's a Banksy. Sold yesterday on Ebay, the sale doesnt include the cost of removing the wall. Once it's removed though does it still count as that famous piece of graffiti on Portobello Road? This all reminds me of the Roald Dahl story, 'Skin':

“Wait,” the dealer interrupted.
“See here, old one. Here is the answer to our problem. I will buy the picture, and I will arrange with a surgeon to remove the skin from your back, and then you will be able to go off on your own and enjoy the great sum of money I shall give you for it.”
“With no skin on my back?”
“No, no, please!-You misunderstand. This surgeon will put a new piece of skin in the place of the old one. It is simple.”
“Could he do that?”
“There is nothing to it.”

Never ever go to a talk about a stained glass window.

The talk was advertised as being by a professor at the Tate, all about the stained glass window in the beautiful St Anne's church of Limehouse. An entire talk about a single window? There must be more to it, I thought. The church was built in the 1750s by the devil's architect himself, Hawksmoor. Probably it'll be full of fascinating historical nuggets about the history of enamelled glass windows and the church's sordid, violent (and maybe even occult) past. It'll probably turn out that St Anne's is built on a powerline leading directly to Hawksmoor's other London churches, corresponding to an Egyptian hieroglyph, and is the key to the secret underworld of Jack the Ripper.

Close, but no cigar. It consisted of an amateur historian/ vicar type talking us through slides of close-ups of the window, pointing out each biblical character in each pane of glass.
'And this is the good thief, he's looking at Jesus.' And so it went for 35 minutes.
During the interval, we took the opportunity to escape whilst the other 18 attendees (clearly all members of the St. Anne's congregation) tucked into the samosas and skewered chicken. Beautiful church though.

Picture of the day at the Tate Modern

Night Vision by Fiona Rae. 1998.
It's hard to feel down about London when you can pop out to the Tate Modern at lunchtime, see some of the world's best modern art for free, and then get back to work for your afternoon meetings. This is my picture of the day.



Fiona Rae's podcast about the picture.


Swimmer by Nicola Tyson.
This came a close second.

The forgotten canals of London

Grand Union Canal

Limehouse Cut

Unmentioned in London tourist guides and by most Londoners, this network of waterways has some of the prettiest views in London. If you haven't taken a stroll along them, you really should put it on your list of things to do in 2008.

Dear Ken

Dear Ken,
Please can we have a bike rental scheme like they have in Paris. The bikes are so ugly and heavy that no one nicks them, there's 750 depots, mainly near rail and metro stations and they're cheap as frites (a euro for 30 mins cycling). Do it Ken, you wont regret it.
Yours sincerely,
Eloise.

Cranes in Limehouse

Since moving to Limehouse, I've been keeping a note of the number of cranes round the area. On the Commercial Road, there's 13 east of Limehouse, and 6 west of Limehouse. That's alot of building and renovation going on. Along the canal there's a new wharf redevlopment springing up every month, each with a special dodgy name: Tequila Wharf, Candy Wharf, Cash-in-on-the-Olympics Wharf. I wonder if the developers have thought about whose actually going to live in these wharfs and new builds. Will the smart young professionals the apartments seem aimed at really be happy shopping at Lidl and eating out at Rajboy on the Commercial Road?

Last unpretensious bar in Shoreditch

This where we had my 'surprise' birthday party: Three Blind Mice on Ravey St, Shoreditch. Cheap rum, higgedly piggedly selection of music, no wankers. What more could you ask for? Careful on the uneven steps though, I sprained my ankle on them.