another weekend – two more to go!

Ok, finally caught up here with all things-blogging. It will be a welcome respite to get back to lands where T-Mobile doesn’t charge me 2 bucks a second to call home. J Its Sunday, but really it feels like every other day here, now that I have very little academic pressure on my shoulders and the happy thought of leaving in exactly two weeks. Lets just say that I will be smiling as I board the plane at Heathrow on Dec 16th. Why, you ask? When London is such a “cosmopolitan” city with so much to do and see and experience and learn and…. Read on. You’ll see.
Friday I went back to Brighton to do some Christmas shopping. I mostly took this trip to go to one store that I didn’t have time to fully explore when my IES class visited and had some ideas for a present that needed certain information before I could safely purchase. As it turned out, I couldn’t find anything in said store that fit my holiday needs…. But, never fear, Brighton is a veritable cornuacopia of consumer pleasures. There must be a couple miles of little specialty shops, along with a massive indoor mall (reminded me of home) with all the usual British big-box stores. I spent almost 9 hours wandering the mean streets of Brighton, cold and occasionally wet, and very wind blown. I could have picked a better day to shop, but whatcha gonna do, eh? It was nice to be able to walk around by myself and see what I want to see and not what 28 other people want to…except that I spent all day shopping, and didn’t really see much of Brighton in the end. Oh well. It was too cold to be by the beach anyway. Ate lunch at a vegan café (waaaaaay too expensive for how much food they give you), got some chai tea, found presents for half the people on my list, along with (I know, it’s the one addiction I have/will never have any control over) 2 pieces of vinyl and two rare books about rave culture Id been searching for for years. I ate dinner at a nationally reknowned vegetarian restaurant (Brighton is full of hippy pleasures), also expensive but nothing like the lunch café. If you ever have a chance, check it out (but make reservations first, I almost didn’t get a table at 5 PM, early for Brits) – Food for Friends, Brighton. I had sweet potato korma with brown rice, a fudge pudding with Bailey’s ice cream and berries, and mint green tea. Yeah, it was good.
Last night I went to my last party here in the UK, Barely Breakin Even Records 11th Birthday Party. The line-up, the space, the price, and the night were all collaborating together in my head to make this a suitable closing party to my time in London. Sadly, and I should have foreseen this, as things go when you build ‘em up in your head, they tend to crash rather unnatractively into walls and all over your happy little conscience. Gr. I mean, who would have thought Giles Peterson, Joey Negro, Dimitri from Paris, Louie Vega, Osulundae, and DJ Premier in the same venue would = boring and soul destroying?? Im still kind of pissed about this, if you cant tell. Canvas, the club it all went down at, is a great venue – huge open dancefloors, lots of couches and chairs, ample bars, and two (2!) coat checks to make the end-of-the-night rush a little less hectic. Yeah, great if you don’t fill it to capacity, and still let people in! By midnight it took me 10 minutes to walk from one end of the club to the other – no joke. I couldn’t dance properly, had numerous drinks spilt all over my backside (if your ever in for a good time, ask me about alcohol and clubs….), and almost fell asleep for lack of anything better to occupy my mind/body. The number of times I was asked by sickly looking little Italian men if I wanted to by any x-t-c just topped it all off. What gives London? Are you so spoiled by a glorious history of raving, world class talent, and some of the best venues in Europe that you’ve forgotten why you started going out in the first place??? Ahhhhhh! Im so over this city. It has started to gross me out, more and more, every day. People can become so ugly when surrounded by nothing but concrete and money.
Today I went to an art exhibition at the Barbican (sweeeet Brutalist living/arts/education complex in N. London) all about sex seen through artists eyes, from Greek/Roman times through to the present. The whole thing was a little ambitious in my opinion, but did well with what they had to display and the space available. It is amazing just how consistent human culture has been on the subject of sexuality in art through the ages. Even during the Victorian era, when sex was a taboo subject and sexual acts were never depicted in art, people still drew dirty pictures behind closed doors. I saw little known pencil/pastel works by Picasso and Rembrandt, a gaggle of ancient Roman, Japanese, Chinese, and Mid-East paintings and etchings, video art by Andy Warhol, and countless other artists’s works, both modern and long-dead. By far the most interesting exhibit was of the French (maybe Italian, cant remember) surrealist Sade’s pencil drawings. If you have a chance, look some of his stuff up – really intricate line drawings that play tricks on the mind and morph and swirl and blur images of human form with death and rebirth, space, and imagination. Quite cool. Another incredibly interesting piece was by a photographer named Nan Goldin who took pictures of people’s intimate lives around New York and put them into a slide show to a piece of creepily beautiful music by Bjork. I was amazed by her attention to detail in these random people’s lives – pictures of people waking up, snuggling on the couch, having sex, walking down the street, looking in the mirror, taking showers. It was the most human piece of art I have ever seen and left me with a rare, warm and safe feeling about the status of this crazy world we all inhabit. That said, all these people were artists that she knew somehow and therefore had different living situations/lifestyles than the majority of people in America. It would have been interesting to see the same exhibit with random couples from all across America, maybe a few cookie-cutter soccer moms, trailer homes in Kentucky, billionaires in LA. I might not have felt so great by the end of that one, or not, who knows! All in all, a worthwile 6 pounds spent, and it took up 3 hours of my Sunday afternoon (which feels like night right about now, the sun set at 3:30 PM today – gross!!!).
Upcoming: I leave Friday for my journey to the muthaland (well sort of), aka Edinburgh. Hopefully some friends of my parents will get back to me about possibly staying at their place soon. Neil, their son, was a good friend of mine during the year we spent in the UK, and I am really looking forward to hopefully reuniting and having all those long drifted-away memories come rushing back full force. Other than that, I might do all or one of the following tomorrow: see a Cuban music show, go to the Tate modern art museum, and play the second to last Monday night poker game of the semester. *Tear*