Posted in Architecture, Literature, tagged commuting, home, London, the clash on November 21, 2008 | No Comments »
The Blonde is back in town. After a two-year, caffeine-soaked, Caramac-stoked commuting craic, I have surrendered to the basement embrace of a tiny Holbornian womb, replete with a forty three year old chain-smoking chav with a Michael Jackson obsession and a seven month old Alsatian called Snatch. Natch.
There is something to be said for the [...]
Posted in Architecture, Art, Fashion, Film, Literature, tagged palaces, stately homes, Versaillles on August 19, 2008 | No Comments »
I have a love/hate affair with what Virginia Woolf called ‘those comfortable padded lunatic asylums which are known euphemistically as the stately homes of England.’ Surely even those without a mother prone to riff on the earnest, sweaty idealism of her days in the SWP must feel the chill fingers of the little match girl [...]
Posted in Architecture, Film, Literature, Theatre, tagged Burbage's theatre, London, memory, Muppets, New York, Paris, Shakespeare on August 6, 2008 | No Comments »
So, the original site of Will’s first Theatre has been found. Londinia, the old tart, sweeps up her crusty skirts to show what she’s been hiding all along and laughs at our redfaced surprise.
We shouldn’t be shocked. Paris may be the curlicued, calorie-controlled charmeuse with the pristine avenues and neatly trimmed bush; New York may [...]
Posted in Architecture, Fashion, Film, Literature, tagged Antony Gormley, Dickens, Don DeLilo, Heath Ledger, the city, The Dark Knight, Underworld on August 1, 2008 | 3 Comments »
In the moist, muggy days of England’s sort-of summer, when I should be out playing croquet with hedgehogs, bathing my milky, sun-shy skin in cucumber-plump Pimms, and wearing a little something like this, I’ve been mentally rooted in the subscape and the skyscrape of the beast we call City: that bustling, shadowed playpen filled with [...]
Posted in Architecture, tagged California, Napa Valley, San Francisco, wine on March 11, 2008 | 4 Comments »
No, I’m not ignoring you. It’s nothing to do with that business with the cilice and the rabbit; I thought that was rather sweet, and certainly original.
In fact, sir, the Blonde exploreth, cruising from that veriginous Cisco town glittering with foggy bay and natty gay to the dust-dank tawny depths of that sere, scrubby valley [...]
Posted in Architecture, Literature, Music, tagged Basquiat Strings, church music, jazz, London, Portico Quartet, Union Chapel Islington on February 29, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Good jazz is like musical metaphor: defamiliarising, juxtaposing, playful, so dense it’s simple, so true it hurts, and so tangible you could reach out and touch it. Under the great sandy ribs and tiny tea lights of Union Chapel, Islington last Friday, I copped a creamy handful from two hungry, young, accessible ensembles who cut [...]
Posted in Architecture, Fashion, Literature, tagged sebastian faulks, Engleby, Human Traces, YSL manifesto, south bank on February 22, 2008 | No Comments »
Truth sounds to me like a fibrous tear; the rip of words stripping us bare. Syntax burrows into self-consciousness’s gossamer gusset to expose the squirming, sacriligious pit below. We shrink at first, closing round the letting-in; then spread ‘em, laugh, recklessly relent to the relief of exposure and the fellowship of shame.
I’ve caught a ripper, [...]
Posted in Architecture, Film, Music, tagged class, Eddy Davis, jazz, Luxembourg, Woody Allen on December 28, 2007 | No Comments »
And so to Luxembourg, the little rich boy on the bourgeois bloc: where the sweet, porcine scent of cloves rises steaming from cups of gluhwein in the gingerbread-hued market square; where the tills of Yves Saint Laurent ping a weary lament to rich multilingual bankers with middle-class spread and lumpen Germanic faces that look like [...]
Posted in Architecture, Art, Music, tagged Bach, simone dinnerstein, sugababes, wigmore hall on October 24, 2007 | No Comments »
I spent last night in the company of the Soul of Music. Splendidly naked, he was gazing up in rapture at the Genius of Fire, that ball of eternal flame, whose gilded rays reached over the aquamarine sky to a humble huddle of mortals below. Lo, struggling beneath the thorny thicket of materialism that sunders [...]
Posted in Architecture, Art, Fashion, Literature, tagged Calke Abbey, English aristocrats, historic houses, National Trust on October 9, 2007 | 1 Comment »
The history of England, as articulated through the annals of its aristocarcy, is an alarming apologue of eccentrcity, obssession and isolation. A class-bound country breeds…well, with itself, leading to a genetically restricted mixture of madness, money and macabre mores.
Calke Abbey is a kind of architectural elegy to the extinction of the rural peer, a giant [...]
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