Look at how fun this shop is.

The street art all over Shoreditch makes me happy. Why don’t I have a van with Mickey Mouse painted on it?

Advice in Shoreditch.

Hi. It’s still terrifically sunny in London (which really isn’t as unusual as people seem to think) and I am stuffing my face with apple slices and crumpets. I am going to The National Portrait Gallery later, and will probably pick up some developed disposables on the way and maybe float up into the sky and become a cloud or something (my usual Friday evening activity).

Here are some songs that I am currently enjoying:
The Jets - Crush On You
DAF - Absolute Bodycontrol
Kelly Family - Fell In Love With An Alien

Smooches to you, humanoids.

Things that I like: Language, the vast world of cultural nuances, & Depeche Mode

Today I went to see “Our Hobby Is Depeche Mode” by Jeremy Deller at The Hayward Gallery with my friends Ed and Anne-Marie. While I was waiting for them on Hungerford Bridge I listened to the people walking past and caught little pieces of conversations in various languages and accents. One of my favourite things about being in central London is being in this condensed bubble of intermingling languages, flitting about like tiny scurrying bluebottles in the air. The smell of a nearby nut vendor was wafting warmly into my nostrils as well, and the sunshine was softly floating about the place, which had already put me into a state of bliss on the train, so I stood and enjoyed watching the stream of people spilling onto the bridge and along the riverside.

The exhibition was fun. We entered a dark room where the film part of the exhibition was showing, “The Posters Came From The Walls,” an hour-long documentary about some of Depeche Mode’s fans from all around the world. There were some choice bits, such as when an American marching band performed a terrific rendition of Enjoy The Silence and when a Russian woman said that the English were in no position to really understand and appreciate Depeche Mode because only Russians can truly recognise the beauty of the despair in their lyrics (or something like that), exclaiming to her translator “translate that even if it’s shocking.” We were positively GUFFAWING at this. Another Russian woman had filled a notebook with cartoons of her and her two friends as the wives of Depeche Mode members, getting into all sorts of shenanigans, and a German family had recreated the Enjoy The Silence video with their small son playing Dave’s role in full robe and crown. Our enjoyment of the film was also somewhat enhanced by a cute little girl who decided to run around and grasp everyone’s knees.

There was a lovely little group of Russian friends in the film as well, one of whom had a fluffy Martin Gore hairstyle, and they danced in a forest and talked about how they were so glad to have found each other through Depeche Mode’s music. It was really touching how much they seemed to love each other. It was just full of fascinating stuff. I feel that I could probably watch a thousand documentaries about Depeche Mode fans. Aside from the film, the exhibition displayed a few fan-made banners and, in a glass case, two of the Russian doodler’s notebooks. They reminded me of the shared notebooks I kept when I was in high school (called my “random diaries”), that were filled with scribbling and inane messages between me and my schoolmates. I’d never created such a wonderfully elaborate fantasy world in which I was married to Andy Fletcher though. The closest my notebooks came to that were a friend’s neatly-written declarations of adoration for Good Charlotte.

I bloody love Depeche Mode. Please also enjoy that last picture, of my red tights and messily-glittered shoes.

A Vague effort at making a blog post

Phone pictures, for all their blurriness and general low-quality, are great things. They allow for maximum sneakiness. They are such a joy. I love all the possibilities being on the tube or any public transport presents you with, but being sneaky is a necessity in these situations, so if you don’t have a camera that looks like a packet of chips for example, a phone is probably your best bet (if you do have a camera that looks like a packet of chips, you are living the dream and I wish you the best). Sadly, the occasional phone has a shutter noise that you can’t turn off, which may inhibit your sneak. There’s an odd charm to such low quality images too. I’m sure in 50 years we’ll all be looking upon old phone pictures with dewy-eyed nostalgia.

This is me and Bungo the Womble on our way to see Simple Minds at The Roundhouse last night, which was excellent. 

I’ve been on so many trains this week, I must have spent so much money on tickets. I left some old zines lying around on trains and in stations, so I hope some of them were enjoyed by commuters. I really do think I could spend a lot of my life on trains. As long as they’re not too crowded it’s so nice just to look at people and skim through discarded Metros and Evening Standards and watch the scenery fly past.

I’m so tired, I feel like a knackered old ghost. I’m going to eat some rice and watch some questionable television in a haze.

Art shows: It Turned Out This Way Cos You Dreamed It This Way & Waste Not

Yesterday I went along to Robert Montgomery’s show at KK Outlet. The gallery had a big sign affixed to its front, and I’m sucker for art that intrudes upon its surroundings in such a way, like a philosophical kick in the eye (and if you now have a certain Bauhaus song stuck in your head, that was my ulterior motive). Montgomery’s poetic and sincere works, installed on billboards, latch onto the hearts of people used to wading through a cold swamp of miserable, robotic advertising and remind them that they’re human and they can burn their tongues on tea and watch dust float about in the sunlight and hold clammy hands and things like that.

 Here is a nice quote from this interview:

“I think if you gave most people the choice of having another ad for a mobile phones or fast food or a little bit of poetry, most people would come down on the side of a little bit of poetry. We get more smiles than complaints doing the billboards, we even get hugs sometimes from passers-by. I think ordinary people in the street are most more engaged and intelligent than the media sometimes give them credit for, and they’re also much more open and receptive to contemporary art than the Daily Mail would have you think.” 

I also spotted something terrific in the KK Outlet shop which made me chuckle at some volume: Peter Andre Saliva Tree (in the form of a concertina book), by Peter James Field. A perfect slice of junk pop culture that brought a tear to my eye. 

Later I went to The Barbican and saw Song Dong’s Waste Not, a sprawling, meticulously organised installation showcasing his mother’s collection of items hoarded over 5 decades. The toys were my favourite, particularly all the dolls. They reminded me of all the things from my past that I threw away and now have a nostalgic longing for (Rookie’s Closet Graveyards addresses this wonderfully). I don’t want to be a hoarder, and there certainly is a curtain of the tragic about this show, but I did come away from it with a bubbling wish to collect, and a wish that I had collected the things that meant a lot to me as a child. That’s part of what having a blog is about. You get to record and remember so much without it taking up physical space.

I might mysteriously leave these on trains.

A fascinating bus stop.