Today

Today I rose with a million women,

and booked it with the Jezebelles,

all in all, a thoroughly enjoyable, enriching day,

reinforcing the twin powers of thinking and doing

("Wonder Twin powers -- ACTIVATE!")

and the possibilities inherent in every London day,

should I seek it out, venturing beyond the endless ennui of Come Dine With Me ,

and its bloodless ilk.

Joy:

It's out there.

Seek it out. Revel in it. Be inspired. Write.

Be To. Or Be To Not.

(The former is infinitely preferable)

Cafe couture

I am blogging to you from one of my favourite cafes in this city -

The Breakfast Club in Hoxton

(although it was their Angel branch that got me hooked)

It is no coincidence that it is Antipodean of origin. We Austrazealanders just know how to make a good cuppa. Fact.

Though, in the interests of accurate journalism, it is not strictly speaking a coffee I am shlurping.

(NO JUDGING!!! It's summer in the city. This, like, never happens here.)

Also? You heard it here first: they are shooting something outside here with a Keira Knightley lookalike. Ooh la la!

Loo-lit of the Month

Stickermania #2: Electric Boogaloo

Art Car Boot Fair

So last Sunday started off bleurgh until my delightful friend K invited me along to the Art Car Boot Fair where I very quickly morphed from morose to merry in less than a minute! There is something so intuitively transformative about certain environments - pass through the gates of a festival and let it overtake you instantaneously! - a buzzing communality, a bustling collectivism that is sadly absent in many other spheres. (Take it from me, that token smiler - every tube carriage has one - trying to catch your eye when the train stops unneccessarily or the driver makes some funny announcement. If you have been this city's citizen for even a short time, believe me, you've averted your eyes from me or my pathologically-people-pleasing-peers at least once in your LondonLifetime ...)

A highlight was sticking my hand up Charles Saatchi's arse, and winning TEN pieces of art. See this post for those items, and the rest of my Art Car Fair Booty.

Stickermania: Episode# 1

'Cos being subversive (but safely these days) is one of My Favourite Things.

To Life!

So the other day I ventured down to Brick Lane on my own and had a fabulous martini. I was so impressed with the description (I so enjoy literary excellence in menus) that I copied it for your enjoyment.

Columbia Martini

(mango vodka, lavender, lemon, love)

Take your senses for a stroll down the old Victorian shop-lined flower market of the East End. Officially Mary Poppins' favourite cocktail. (And she drank on the job!)

I am an unashamed sucker for twee. This is one of the reasons I love you, London!

"I Can See London From My House!"

Reason #306,904,227 To Be Grateful.

But I do have to summons them sometimes. I am a creature who vacillates between the highest of highs and the depths of meh: things can weigh heavily, or merely appear to ...

Probably the latter informing the former.

A good read always helps. At the moment it takes the form of Amy Hempel's collected short stories. (If sentences turn you on - read her writing.) I was instantly drawn to its title - The Dog Of Marriage - and ultimately convinced by this cover review -

"If there's a funnier, smarter, or richer book published this year, I will eat my shoes".

Courtesy of my longterm read, The Guardian, noch! I love the visual. It almost inspires me to write and publish that book! Chew your platforms, beyotch!

Bedtime, she wrote.

Hugs to all.


**** Also Picture A may be blurrier but it's sunnier. If you're a local you'll get why that makes it a much better shot.

Happy Carnival Day!

A shout out to Mr P and our pals - Risa, Dustin, Madeline, Cyn and Dash amongst them - and all other souls brave enough to face the crowds to fight for our (collective, inalienable) right to part-ay ...

all the way from this northeasterly couch, lazily dotted by the speckled sunlight, with The Street's Dry Your Eyes Mate quietly, LDNly, emoting in the background,

happier, she wrote, than I've been in days.

Happy Carnival, y'all, no matter where you are and what floats your proverbial. Different strokes for drummond folks, vive la difference, yadda*

(*to the power of 3)

Anarchy In The UK

On Sunday I went along to a radical ramble in SE1.

Five Things I Loved About It:
1. Feeling of doing something mildly subversive. I'm such a middle class pretender!
2. Hearing stories of the past that aren't the Grand Master Narrative kinda "Histories" taught at school (big wars, great men, small peenii).
3. Seeing bits of London I otherwise never see. It's a good day when I leave N19.
4. Recalling for the zillionth time the beats that this city PULSATES. I am an expat in lurrve!
5. I saw Mary Wollstonecraft's house!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Five Things I Loathed About It:
1. I go to these lefty things to feel kinship. I therefore don't fully get how these supposed right-on humanists can justify not mustering even the slightest bit of warmth towards, er, me. But you know what I mean: that holier-than-thou, judgey mcjudgerson type. I kind of think that most radicals regardless of whatever spectrum they sit at share a personality trait, ie, not having much of one. That's why that feminist=humourless trope fucks me off. Maybe Dworkin wasn't much of a smiler but put me in a room with Jo Brand, Germaine Greer, Janeane Garofolo, Gloria Steinem, Tina Fey, Dawn French, Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Margaret Cho and I betcha there'd be laughs a'plenty.
2.The commemorative stone for Percy Shelley. Now obscured by the directives of a Death to Aesthetics! estate. (See pics for travesty)
3.The unshakeable sense that I was a hypocritical middle class JAP because I'm neither a vegan nor a squatter.
4.The fact that these alternative stories which are rich and dynamic have, like their protagonists, been marginalised to the degree that they are rarely shared outside the few that actively seek them out.
5. The utter arrogance/ historical blindness of the guide who felt the need to highlight Wollstonecraft's "contradictions" in that she advocated for women's rights but not for those working women. Way to project your contemporary agenda onto a brave, progressive thinking historical heroine, dude! While you're at it, wanna slam for Martin Luther King jr for not protesting for gay rights or Gandhi for not having a Twitter account?

Hmmmmm. WWGT? (What Would Gandhi Tweet?)

Eat Your Heart Out, Ally McBeal ...

Spotted on the Embankment, Monday July 27th 2009.

Dr Plog Goes To Wimbledon

... which is actually antithetical to all that I stand for and makes mockery of my hippy-dippy love all (ahem!) bullshit: I am actually a bigoted anti-sportite. Hate it both as participant and spectator. But I do like any excuse to drink all day so I did the District Linedance - and actually ended up enjoying the games/sets/matches! Saw the Williams sisters but couldn't make out the balls after they thwacked them as they were rendered into that total cartoon imagining of something literally zooming by. Saw Martina The Great (Love her! She was in fact the first person I ever knew was a lesbian when I learnt the term so I've always had a positive association with the word.) And as an Oystrayliyan it was fair dinkum bonza, mate, to see the bloke Mr Spooner would have known as Cat Pash! And whodathunk there was still a market for his sweaty headbands?

So the moral of the story is? Don't judge a sport by how mindnumbingly boring it is on television ...

Soup Kitchen

To anyone living in or visting London, I have one aggressive recommendation for you:

Do. A. London. Walk!

A few weeks ago, when Mama Plog was visiting, we arose one early Sunday morn and headed to Aldgate Tube station where we joined a tour of the historically Jewish East End.

I loved it.

(I've also done Oscar Wilde's London and Jack the Ripper's London. I was only savvy enough to have issues with the latter retrospectively. So ... not that savvy, then)

The photo above is of a building formerly used as a "Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor". Now that's a group you don't hear about too much these days! Although they may feature more prominently in a post-Madoff world. Now there's a schmuck! Like we didn't have bad press anyway. Sociopathic dickwad.

Anyway this is how immature my beloved is. Upon seeing the photo above, he giggled like a schoolgirl after three packs of strawberry Hubba Bubba:

"Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poo?!?!?!"

Oh, Mr. Plog! Mr HANKY, more like.

Restoring Faith

Paloma, that is.

I went to her album showcase last night at ICA (click on link for their brilliant summer series "Film We Love". Genius!)

PF (real surname: Blomfield. The JC must surely be sniffing around) is a real performer and the showcase was like being at a show. Every song was listenable. I can be the biggest painus (Plogish for "pain in the anus") at gigs, shifting my feet, getting tired, sneaking off to the bar every 4.5 seconds ... but the Amy Adamsalike (hence her instant increased likeability factor for me) held court like a true star of the stage.

My heart wept for the other Amy, though.

(Sorry about camera angling. I'm a first timer!)

Walk Upon England's Mountain Green

According to recent surveys, I live in the "least green" (ie, park-filled) borough in London. And yet - and yet! - all that you see above is a mere short walk from my homestead. How lucky am I, ungardened backyardlessness notwithstanding?!

The photos were taken exactly two weeks ago - on a bewwdddiful day (as Con may have said in those halcyon days of yore) during a really rejuvenating two-hour walk. Today is more of a Sedentary Saturday. If I were a wanker I would say today I really need to "regroup", but I'm not, so I won't. Oh, I guess I just did ergo I am. Always had my suspicions anyway.

One of my best buddies, J, studied Latin a few years ago (And people tell me Yiddish is a dying language?!). She taught me a few excellent etymologies, one of which is:

Pro = For
Craste = Tomorrow

And thus we in the Modern World have procrastinating, which is what I am doing right now. And since I don't want to leave this backlog of paperwork, tidying and washing "for tomorrow", I shall bid you good day (or g'day, as my kinfolk would have it) and hope your end suitably justifies your week.