Too Cool for Crack

Louise Bourgeois must have some seriously freaky dreams. If this building sized arachnid sculpture is anything to go by, I suspect David Lynch would pay handsomely to surf the sub-conscious of the diminutive artist.

We recently went to the Tate Modern to see "the crack", which (warning, excruciating pun ahead) is not all it's cracked up to be. I can muster a healthy respect for the architectural challenges the artist must have overcome to be able to introduce a massive fault into the foundations of one of London's most iconic buildings, but as an artistic device I think it falls somewhat short of it's alleged purpose.

The artist's intention, according the pamphlet we received at the door, was to describe the divide between wealthy and poor, the affluent West and the blighted post-colonial third world. In the turbine hall of the Tate Modern though, there is nothing to indicate that your experience of the world is at all different depending on which side of the crack you inhabit.

The differences between the first and third worlds are stark and they certainly merit public attention, so why present it in a manner so abstract as to make no attempt to describe the difference? Perhaps it was for the ironic enjoyment of the artist. After all, there I was, a warmly-dressed white middle class Westerner feeling that I didn't quite understand what to do about this chasm, or myself... a sentiment I feel whenever I read about the very distant but very real suffering of people in poorer parts of the world.

Either way, I failed to find a way to photograph the crack that didn't reduce it to an uninteresting documentation of the texture of concrete, so I concentrated on the massive and much more visceral experience just outside the entrance, Louise Bourgeois' Spider. This cold, metal monster speaks much more clearly of the dark side of the human experience.

Sitges and Barcelona, May 2007

I cheekily created this blog entry without any actual content because I wanted it to appear as being written in May when I did eventually get around to it. In the meantime, the pictures are here.

"Professionally cleaned"

Monday, 23 April 2007

On Saturday, we packed our wordly belongings and headed North, crossing the Thames with a twinge of nostalgia. For Kei, this was a homecoming, a return to the safety and comfort of charted territory. For myself, it was an adventure, my second permanent address in London and a tentative step towards a more suburban existence.

Whatever our various expectations of our future home, neither of us were quite prepared for the comical and trying array of mishaps that littered our path to homeliness. Less than twenty four hours before moving in, literally as the ink dried on our contract, we overheard a conversation at the rear of the letting agent's office describing our boiler as broken and leaking. This in fact turned out to be two separate problems, one in the boiler, one in the plumbing beneath the bathtub which was leaking into our neighbours apartment.

The remote control for the underground parking was taken by the previous tenant and so after three days of haranguing the letting agent, the landlord purchased a new one and then insisted that we pay a deposit for it. The telephone line has not been used since the early nineties and requires an engineer to activate it. The electricity meter was in debt when we arrived and so we had to pay the previous tenants owings just to switch the lights on. The fridge smelled like something had died in it, and then been ressurected to do the work of Satan, and then died again. The duplicate keys we had cut didn't work and the key cutter seems to have left town. The electricity panel for the boiler is literally hanging out of the wall, exposed live wires dangling inches from a fifty litre water reservoir.

While moving furniture around we discovered that each piece had been carefully placed to hide a pointillist artwork no doubt rendered with smouldering discarded cigarettes (which explains why all the furniture the landlord purchased claims in large bold letters to be FLAME RESISTANT). I had been assured by the agent that the apartment would be "professionally cleaned" before we moved in and unless by professional he meant a blind, armless toddler with attention deficit disorder and a feather duster would be left alone in the flat for an hour, he might have been stretching the truth a little. The stove was invisible for the congealed Korean cooking oils which I now know are resistent even to industrial grade solvents. If they're enriching uranium, it might well be for the peaceful purpose of cleaning the nation's hobs and ovens. The carpet, when vacuumed, went from smoker's lung to smoker's teeth on the Pantone color chart.

The final straw came when I returned the hire vehicle we had used, only to be told that the spare tyre was missing. I had not checked for it before taking possession and so was legally liable for the cost of replacement. Thank goodness for the security guard who discovered that several spare tyres were missing besides my own ("It's them bleeding kids wot nick 'em") otherwise the manager may well have been the next victim of our Indesit fridge/freezer from Hades.

By now we are more or less settled in. Various bits of the apartment are starting to look inhabitable and I'm particularly proud of the IKEA bookcase (assembled by myself with only one minor injury) which will some day double as a television stand.

Very sick notes

I was recently reminiscing about how towards the end of my days at the yuppie-factory called Pretoria Boys High School I didn't care very much about the consequences of my actions. I had already plotted my escape to a near-by private college for people who never quite adjusted to conventional schooling and one of the ways that I expressed my new found freedom from persecution was to write fake sick notes for whomever asked me.

I prided myself on being able to simulate the perfunctory, half-heartedly officious tone that an overworked mother-of-three might use when composing such a note but looking back it would have been so much more fun to give a twisted voice to the bizarre and tragic reality of suburban life in the conservative capital. Imagine:

"Edward will need to leave school early today for a doctor's appointment - his brother George, by far our favourite child has a rare form of Leukemia and we're hoping to harvest little Eddie's bone marrow before he's old enough to get a restraining order. He's already all up in arms about his human rights thanks to that communist-sympathiser of a history teacher your governing body chose to employ. Edward will probably be off school until we can transport him to school without getting the seats of the Volvo all bloody."

"Please excuse Cuthbert from class this afternoon - he has an enormous sebaceous cyst which needs lancing. The last time we left it too late and it exploded spontaneously at Jimmy Goldberg's birthday party, spraying this cottage cheese like pus all over the cake which was a terrible embarrassment (although it could probably only have improved the flavour knowing Gloria's cooking). It was especially trying as it happened just days after the poor boy's biological mother was arrested at the border again. Thanks so much!"

How hot is hot enough?

Stop Global Warming!, originally uploaded by Abri_Beluga.

My partner and I rarely agree on an ideal temperature. I'm sure that if nuclear proliferation turned nasty and we saw the incandescent wave of flesh-melting fission rolling towards us his last words would be something like "... at last! Where's my speedo?"

I'm partial to more temperate climes and so the global warming issue is one that I try to keep abreast of. A colleague of mine has been trying to convince me that upstanding members of the scientific community have debunked the 'myth' of global warming and that what we're experiencing is a temporary anomaly - the global equivalent of stepping out in a sweater when in fact a vest would have done nicely. This sort of contrariness resembles the infamous medical wisdom of Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, amongst others.

I'm inclined to believe that human beings are at fault - we are impatient innovators. So many ideas take hold before the consequences can be perceived. Lead pipes witnessed the birth of modern plumbing and poisoned it. Chlorofluorocarbons kept our food cold and germ-free as it dissolved our fragile atmospheric sunblock. There are more of us than ever before, more of us with cars, computers and our ungainly, contemptible 'carbon footprints'.

It may just be my Baptist upbringing speaking, but I think it's more convenient to assume that you screwed up, intentionally or not, pay your tithes (now called 'green tax') for absolution and then make a doomed but noble attempt at self rehabiliation. The worst that could happen is that a few excess trees are planted. Oh, the horror.

90s hair

90s hair, originally uploaded by david.stockwell.

To misquote Oscar Wilde, if you can't be a work of art, you should shave one into your head. My stylist seems to have taken inspiration from The L'Oréal Studio Line logos of the early 90s (What frigid heart is not warmed by the memory of those naive, synthesised jingles in the spirit of "Jane Seymour Set Two / Is Something New / Spray it on / Dry hair and your style will / Stay there").

In London, home of the Mercurochrome Mohawk, my 'fro went largely unremarked upon, except at work where I won the weekly Homer Simpson-inspired "Doh" award. I shudder to think what lengths I might have to go to stop traffic in this controversy-proof metropolis.

I do wonder these days if I'm a little bit past the age where these gestures tip over from art to anachronism. I always assumed I'd be the little old lady in the purple coat and red hat, so really this is all just practice for when I'm good-and-proper-eccentric.

Even my parents, who weathered all sorts of rebellious antics from The Tatoo Incident through to dying my eyelashes, have begun to see the lighter side of my precociousness - and they live in Pretoria, a city where the word Satanist is applied to everything not directly endorsed by the co-conspiring Dutch Reformed church and their public relations unit, the powerful tuck-shop mothers association.

Perhaps it is time to lay down the shears and my personal battle with conservativeness and apply my attention-seeking to more appropriate causes... I'm sure there's a cause out there that needs me... something that demands intelligence, philanthropy and oddly matched socks.

"I've got Patrick on the line"

I recently went to the V&A Museum to see the exhibition of Kylie Minogue's performance costumes. Unfortunately, the exhibition was sold out when I arrived, but I took advantage of the unreserved areas and browsed the store. The store had laid out a number of fashion related products and this imposing book caught my eye. The first name in the list of celebrated designers is Patrick Demarchelier... a name that Meryl streep immortalised for me in The Devil Wears Prada with her imperious demands to "get me Demarchelier".



On the other side of the street a group of people had gathered outside the Fashion Week venue to decry the "size zero" standards of contemporary fashion design. I'm pleased that some people will not tolerate unrealistic standards being propagated by the media and the fashion mafia. I would love to be able to wear the things that appeal to me visually, but those things are rarely tailored for the endomorph. This doesn't seem fair, but then again, perhaps I should choose something more appropriate to wear.

I love Meryl Streep's character in the film. It's with equal measures of mirth and disgust that I marvel at her caustically benevolent decision to "hire the smart, fat girl" for a change. It's all the more satisfying when the said girl realises that it's her choice to play the game, or not. But is it really a choice if you're conditioned over a lifetime?

Farewell, Munich

Munich rocks. Well, actually, it doesn't rock... it's a little bit too Catholic for all that although I've been assured that the Oktoberfest can be a spectacle of wholly unchaste behaviour. I'm going to miss my clever, jovial and kind new friends.

One of the best thing about Munich, though, is how much it's rejuvenated my love for London. I could barely wait to rejoin my seven and half million neighbours. Nowadays, that seems to be rather a nice number of people to have around you.

The first thing that struck me as I stepped onto the Paddington concourse was the youthfulness... an ironic observation considering how old and crusty London is in almost every detail except the inhabitants and the odd skyscraper.

I'm more portrait than Dorian myself, and my choice of 'fashion' extends to those things that I can squeeze past my thighs and multiple chins, but somehow the mod-punks, the grunge-goths, even the posh posers and the conspicuously casual elicit warm feelings of affiliation.

I've been reading Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and it has the disquieting but entertaining effect of redressing everyone as a packet of replicating genes - a complex of behaviours engineered for the purpose of duplicating it's chromosomal components.

In a city so big, it's as if we are little genes, influencing a larger organism, endowing it, individually, with attributes more complex than eye colour... with agendas instead of phenotypes. We compete and co-operate, merge and multiply, asserting our individual wills by forming communities.

Pork for dinner

Pork for dinner, originally uploaded by david.stockwell.

Bavaria does not look kindly on vegetarians. The signs are everywhere. Bronze boar statues along the central parade, menus that include a single lonely pasta dish as the vegetarian alternative to thirty different kinds of sausage. This photo, shot at a store-front in the town centre, takes the obsessive carnivore thing to cannibalistic, if artistic heights.

It's not all bad news, though. This evening I discovered a pastry that is both croissant and pretzel... soft and buttery on the inside, salty and dark on the outside. Also, at the local supermarket I found coconut flavoured cereal bars delightfully called "Corny".

And then there's the doughnuts...

Munich, Day 7

As I learnt yesterday, Munich is in the heart of Bavaria... which is a kind of überdeutsche Germany. This is where the stereotypical lederhosen come from and even today apparently, walking around with a dead squirrel tail extending from your William Tell style hat does not solicit the merest giggle.

So... in a town where you could miss rush hour if you blinked, and shopping on Sunday is considered devil-worship, it's a little surprising to find that many are things are enviably modern and well-designed. The Alianz Arena is Munich's sports stadium and it's enormous, clever and approachable in the way of a giant marshmallow.

The exterior is made of cushions of dry air which can be individually illuminated (but they aren't because it tends to distract drivers on the adjacent autobahn). Inside it's all German engineering with broad concrete passages and masses of steel scaffolding. Check out the pictures here.

Munich, Day 4

Life in Munich seems to have a very civilised pace. It's so civilised in fact that even the homeless people seem to be only half-heartedly invested in their role as failures of society. There's was something suspiciously industrious in the loitering of the haphazardly dressed lady on twisted crutches that I passed this morning.

My colleague and I continue to flail around in the sea of knowledge that surrounds us. It would seem that just as soon as you grasp the finer details of the bit you're focusing on, a previously understood component dissolves into a gooey mass of brain-gunk. Some days I feel triumphant as another puzzle piece slides into place and other days I feel like I'm justs free-wheeling along one of those spaghetti strands on a Jackson Pollock canvas. By all accounts this is the common experience and we can expect Normality or a reasonable facsimile thereof within a couple of months.

The process is slightly defeated by a panicky competitiveness that sometimes arises. My colleague's leg twitches and his eyes dart around the room if he thinks I've gotten slightly ahead of him in the process of understanding something. I should be so lucky. I'm going to switch his espresso with decaf.

Munich, Day 1

It's not even ten o' clock but I'm knackered. The excitement of imminent travel and deeply rooted fears of missing planes means I got little sleep last night before setting off at five this morning for Heathrow.

Munich is lovely. The skyscraper to cow ratio leans heavily in the bovine direction and I get the feeling that people like it that way. The staff at the Munich office are, much like London's staff, friendly, warm, good-humoured and enthusiastic.

We had a buffet lunch at the local Italian (where Holger was at pains to find something even a little bit vegetarian for me) and the bill came to a shocking six euros each. It's easy to forget how expensive London is if you live there.

After a vigorous discussion about work and the training ahead, Jose and I headed for the All You Can Eat 'Running Sushi' (because 'Conveyer Belt' is such an unappetising phrase) from whence the photo comes. Just when I thought I could well and truly dispose of my stereotypes about Germans, a lovely leather-clad couple with the better part of a slinky stitched into their faces sat down across the way.

Between our collective Portuguese, French, English and Afrikaans, we eventually muddled our way through the ordering and paying with touristy giggles. It still tickles me to see a Japanese woman rattling off in German or French. Our bill once again came to a total that would buy you a breadstick and bowl of olives in Soho.

The cigarette vending machines hang outside buildings where you would expect telephones to be and the houses and apartment blocks look like giant pastel-coloured lego blocks. Everyone looks German in a way that seems oddly familiar - probably because Cape Town, where I lived for eight years, is something of a Berlin-by-the-sea.

Blue Steel

Blue Steel, originally uploaded by david.stockwell.

Dave is never short of attitude but occasionally it hits you between the temples like a triple espresso. This photo captures such a moment - reminiscent of the infamous Blue Steel (Zoolander), the coiffe, pursed lips and assymetric, narrowed eyes conspire to disdain where no man has disdained before.

It was supposedly a solemn occasion - the last time I will see Dave before he returns to SA for a few months. Solemnity was scarce, though, and inversely proportional to the amount of Jack Daniels consumed.

The merriment threatened to overtake more practical concerns exemplified by the three hours it took to mash some potatoes. We did however manage to prepare and enjoy four courses including a lemon garlic prawns (eaten with sticky fingers) and one of Dave's pear desserts (the kind that requires an entire plantation of cinnamon to produce).

Kimpton, where our dinner took place, is one of those postcard-pretty English villages, replete with rolling green hills, the occasional copse and a healthy population of horses, chickens, dogs and Mercedes driving retirees.