Overheard in Finsbury Park

A Romanian construction worker talking on the phone with his buddy (so much construction going on in my hood that I am bound to stumble across ‘manians everywhere) “Ok, so this is what you do. You say ok to what he says and do what you want.” – very famous saying back home by which everyone functions (zici ca el/ea si faci ca tine). Eveeryone… Dunno why really.

Retro Euro music – Sabrina Setlur Du liebst mich nicht

ridic

Argh, sometimes wordpress frustrates me to no end, so there you go, double bill of Cloth London vintage trims and buttons. Yes, it’s the same photo.

Charming finds in Soho

Amazing(ly disgusting) retro dieting methods

Oh, modern media making us obsess over weight!!! It looks like we’ve been body nazis for ages. Seriously, tapeworms?! These people probably didn’t study proper biology in school, otherwise they’d regurgitate food just thinking about it. I mean, those things sometimes pop out of your mouth or nose like a periscope and check out the weather. (Thanks V for pic)

The trash and the ugly

On the tree of the Beeb, there’s one branch that swings the most rotten addictive fruits. BBC 3, a newish channel aimed at young audiences, has the most batshit crazy factual programming. I am not talking only  about shows like “Am I normal?” or “Embrassing bodies” (aka ugly ‘ginas) or ‘Make my Body Younger.” I don’t watch those but from the previews and reviews I gathered they’re not really my thing when there’s “Porn: A family business” on Virgin at the same time every night.  Or maybe my TV knows when I am watching and it just inserts this show. Maybe my TV set is like electrons, which change their behaviour from a particle to a wave when they are being watched.  There’s no kinky stuff when I am not wacthing, but as soon as I turn it on, booof! Or there’s the possibility that all editors have lost thier mind and are commissioning trash left and right. Trash I can’t stop watching! So the Beeb had to give into this popular factual niche – aka what fairly stupid/horrid/weird/catastrophical/absolutely average people do and let themselves be filmed. Let’s take a doc broadcast a few nights ago about a beauty pageant mom from Britain who wants her 11- year old daugther to make it big at US pageants “Sasha:Beauty Queen at 11.” Not only does Jayne bleach Sasha’s hair, get her to put on make up and do her nails, making poor lass look like an underage Jordan, but she also pushes her to practise her cheerleading  routines wherever, whenever. Even the dance teacher notes the girl is really not into it.   But then when you see a close up of her pretty, albeit prematurely aged little face saying “I really want to be famous. I want to be on TV” when asked by the producers what she really wants, then it gets even more confusing. “I don’t know why. No clue.” Me neither, no clue. But when her mom mutters every two shots ” She’s going to be big. Look at her,” she sets her up for standards that the poor girl will have to aspire to, like any normal child who wants her parent’s approval. It seems to be all about the mostly female body and what we can do with it, how  we can manipulate it to make it so-called “perfect.” My favorite show of this type on Beeb 3 “Snog Marry Avoid” (I’ve only seen it once, though) is where “Pod,” a machine takes some skanks off the street, pulls out their fake tan and extensions as they invariably all have and operates to “return them to their natural beauty data” not before subjecting them to a batch of public bashing. Captain Subtext says, Pod – no relationship with Ipod – makes them look like normal, pretty girls who don’t wear ducktape for bras when clubbing (true story). I am not sure how real the setup is, but the show checks on the girls after 3 months to see if they have returned to their old ways. Some of them do. “I can’t live without tan” says one.  Darling, you fucking need tar to make yourself pretty.  And possibly a neuron implant.

Cuban Fest on southern pastures

London can be quite a sunny place, but it could never be confounded with Cuba. The two day fest held in Southwark Parkpacked a punch when a few thousand people showed up for chicken jerk, mojitos and caliente reggaeton. Despite the abysmal location – Canada Water is not the sexiest kitten in the litter – the crowds kept on coming in droves. By the time we had been badly burned by the sun, the lawn was packed and the line for tap beer was threatening to turn into a terminal trans-Atlantic arrivals queue.

Low points: people giving out fliers for some Christian tv channel, 2 pounds for a Cola Light, and the children poverty quiz.

High points: the music, the toilets, the chickeeeeeeen.

A wild sheep chase

Last night the Beeb had another great programme. “Imagine a wild sheep chase” tried to trace the inspiration for Haruki Murakami’s spectacularly popular novels. The portrait of a writer turned into a hybrid story of the writer’s inner world and the culture it takes its sap. It wasn’t an easy feat mind you, as famously reclusive Murakami only communicated his answers through email. So the producers used  reconstruction of scenes from his books, translators, editors, fans, students from the dormitory where Murakami lived and which inspired one of his more famous books “Norwegian Wood” trying to recreate a sense of Murakami. One of the interviewees described the feeling one gets when reading one of his novels as having the brain turned inside out. He vouched for that.

I vouch for that too. I can’t pinpoint which of his books I first saw on a bookshelf, but the one that I first read was “The Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.” Probably one of the lesser known ones, but I was gobsmacked by the title. As the character goes deeper into the bowels of the earth trying to escape the hard-boiled wonderland (eerie modern day Japan) into a fantasy world on the border between psyche and technology, one’s synapses are snapping into the unsettling sensation of merging with the character’s loneliness.  One can’t help but wonder if the relationships he builds along the way are in any way real and if in the end, he is still alone in his mind.

My favourite part of the whole programme was the conversation with the white cat on backstreets of presumably Tokyo.

Tate Modern’s draped in people

Tate has some smokin’ exhibits as usual. The street art selection is wildly varying and bizarre. The one that got me – and I ashamedly have to admit I fell into the optic illusion and cliche trap – is the young black man holding what looks like a gun at a sweeping glance, but is in fact a camera.  The other exhibitions were interesting but not that memorable, except for the 50 (?) pieces of silverware made into some sort of floating/hanging household  UFOs… Otherwise, modern art (again, some of the exhibits gave me flashbacks of college philosophy class in which we discussed endlessly what is art and what is the function of art) cannot contact me on most wavelengths. A red painting with a white line one third to the left. What? Is? That? A room in black with white geometrical forms intersected by a flurry of parallel white lines. Vertigo.Then a stack of bricks. Someone somewhere could use that better.                                                                               Another room that almost provoked a hysterical/depressive fit was the hall with Communist propaganda poster  from the 40′s and 50′s. The friend accompanying me who had also lived some 8-odd years through Communism albeit in a different country found them comforting. I found myself displaced in a creepy history loop on the corridors of my primary school. Funnily there were some posters in Arabic talking about the Muslim comrades. How outdated the political/economic model is… China is going capitalist, Cuba has access to internet and cellphones, and even the FARC are struggling to keep the revolution alive in the jungles of Latin America.                                                                                                                                 But that is deviating from modern art… The works of modern art that stuck with me are a falling piano and Bill Viola’s “Five Angels for the Millenium”  five years ago at Tate Modern. One made a lot of noise and looked dangerous and the other was an engrossing experience.

People married to objects

Have you ever had a crush on a mug? Or maybe a library bookshelf? No? Thought so. The Independent has an article on “objectum sexual,” a group of people who share emotional and sexual bonds with inanimate objects. Some even marry them. The most glorious examples are the Swedish woman who married the Berlin Wall and the American woman who wed the Eiffel Tower. Strange, since “tour” is feminine in French despite its phallic appearance. Does that make her gay? There’s a documentary on Five tomorrow…. more strangeness then.