On Tuesday night, we found ourselves standing in a street in Shoreditch with a hundred or so others, all sporting plastic Alfred Jarry masks. The occasion: a group photo to mark the launch of Alastair Brotchie's handsome and indispensable tome on the great 'Pataphysician. Inside The Griffin pub, the pool table had been temporarily transformed …
Category: London
no boundary condition
I've been twice so far to see the current exhibition at the Lisson Gallery: No Boundary Condition - paintings and sculptures by Shirazeh Houshiary. It's the paintings I'm most drawn to - shimmering, shifting, mirage-like pieces, with their captivating titles ('Wither', 'Sigh', 'Ebb', 'Between'); the intense, bruised colours; and the surfaces, which appear to have …
a crumb of literary comfort
On a lunchtime wander this week, I came across this plaque: There I was, dragging about in a fog of head-cold and office blues, and suddenly I'm connected to Eliot - his 'lonely cab-horse steams and stamps' only a few streets away from where I earn the crust that keeps the wolf from the door. …
heat wavelet
I can't help it. I know it's superficial but I'm revelling in this late, short blast of summer weather. Those uninterrupted blue skies over London make me happy. I love the strange sense I have of my childhood Australian summers revisiting me in London in October. I never thought I'd be lowering the blinds to …
notes from yesterday
A breezy, summer's-last-hurrah day. A rare lie in, cups of tea, Radio 3. Late breakfast: wilted spinach and poached eggs on toast, to set us up nicely for the day's cultural exertions. First stop, the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair at Exmouth Market, organised by the excellent CB editions. An inspiring, if slightly overwhelming, event …
cultural pick-me-up
Headed to the British Museum after work on Friday to check out a couple of their Australian Season offerings. Out of Australia featured prints and drawings by Australian artists from the 1940s to the present day, and was an absorbing and varied show. Amongst my favourites were Sidney Nolan's powerful felt-tipped pen drawings of drought-struck …
three good things I did this week
1. Wednesday evening to Loose Muse at the Poetry Café, for some stimulating and varied readings from women writers. A mixture of open mic spots and longer readings from the two featured poets, Karen Head and Katrina Naomi. I was particularly taken by the poems Katrina Naomi read, which were quirky, a bit edgy, perfectly pitched. …
London peloton
This is one of the things I love about London - setting off on my bike on a summer morning, a cloudless blue sky above and the tall plane trees resplendent in the sunshine, vivid green against the blue; the air almost fresh (for London), already a sense that the temperature is rising; catching a …
avian des res
At the end of a long week, on a day of high wind and changeable skies, we refreshed our somewhat battered souls by wandering over the river to seek out the Chelsea half of Spontaneous City in the Tree of Heaven, a sculptural installation by London Fieldworks. The site: Cremorne Gardens, tucked away between the …
much better chop
To the Susan Hiller retrospective at Tate Britain on Good Friday afternoon. In contrast to the previous Friday's art fix, I was pretty impressed by this show, which presents a body of work produced over 40 years. Some of Hiller's recurrent themes include language, the subconscious, the hidden meanings and value of ephemera (the Rough …
