coffee and cake

Tokyo photo found!

Berlin 7th - 10th February

8th February

1. Neue National Galerie: Mies van der Roher building, Paul Klee exhibition

2. Alte National Galerie: German Romantics, Caspar David Fridrich

3. Pergamon Museum: Pergamon alter piece, Ishtar gate, Market gate of Miletus, Babylonian processional street

4. Altes Museum: bust of Nefertiti

5. Berliner Dom (Cathedral)

6.Unter den Linden: long street between Brandenburg Gate and the Museumsinsel

7. Film by Dante Lam, part of the Berlinale, screened at Cubix near Alexanderplatz

8. Visit the Reichstag, go up the Dome by Norman Foster, have dinner at the Reichstag restaurant

9th February

1. Bauhaus Museum

2. Cafe Einstein for lunch

3. Jewish Museum: Daniel Libeskind building, and the Holocaust tower

4. Check Point Charlie

5. Gestapo HQ 'topographia des terrors'

6. Missing Building by Christian Boltanski, opposite the Jewish School

7. Walk around Alackaescher Hofe

8. Alexanderplatz

9. Kino International on Karl Marx Allee. Saw Michael Winterbottom's documentary of Naomi Klein's book 'The Shock Doctrine'

10. Afterparty for Revolution FIlms at the Newton Bar

11. Lutter & Wenger for supper

12. 'Barbe Bleu' by Catherine Breillat at Potsdammer Platz, Sony Centre

10th February

1. Brecht's House

2. Hamburger Bahnhof contemporary art museum

3. Hitler's Bunker, near Wilheln Straise

4. Fragments of the Berlin wall

Vanbrugh tour, Pt. 1: Castle Howard, Mausoleum

Castle Howard's Mausoleum was actually designed by Hawksmoor. Although it is closed to visitors, we managed to get a look around. The gate opened using an enormous rusty key. Only About about three members of the family are buried 'downstairs'. As a result, most of the catacoomb looks like alcoves full of baker's ovens. Upstairs, inside was the most exquisite chaple. Again it was too dark to take photographs, but I shall try and find an etching of what it looks like. The whole place is in a fantastic state of decay. The outside battered nearly black by the winds, and all of the balerstraids falling apart. It was very tempting to take one home, but then you've got to remember about looters bad luck! I just took pictures instead.

Vanbrugh tour, Pt. 1: Castle Howard, Temple of the Four Winds

This is a picture of one of the winds. We went inside as well, although it was a little dark to take clear pictures. There was a table in the center and above, the decoration on the cealing was extraordinary. The walls were painted to have the effect of marbled veins.

Vanbrugh tour, Pt. 1: Castle Howard

Here are a few photographs from my trip. This is the detail from one of the pediments leading to the Temple of the Four Winds.

Angry In Brooklyn

Thursday morning I went to Brooklyn. On  on 3rd Street I took this photograph. The hand painted slogan reads: 'NO MORE CORPORATE BULLSHIT!FUK WALL ST. !' Although it seems a little trite writing it out in compute text, the scale of this graffiti is so big that its statement completely dominated the skyline. It was in a trendy part of Brooklyn, but on a derelict site. Without Manhattan sky scrapers to blot out the phrase, it really screamed out. The tone of the work was particularly jarring because the day I visited this part of town happened to be incredibly beautiful 9.11 weather. 

'My Lost City'

A fairly old article (2003) by Luc Sante in the New York Review of Books is spot on about the city's extraordinary buildings and why they haunt the imagination. The depiction of New York as an elderly metropolis connects with Wall Street's crumbling (demolished) fiscal might. Every day the press is full of photographs that depict 'the suits' in abject despair. Their expressions seem to portray Sante's meditations word for word.  

New York is neither the Wonder City nor a half-populated ruin but a vulnerable, overcrowded, anxious, half-deluded, all-too-human town, shaken by a cataclysm nobody could have foreseen.

(the photograph is from the 'front page' of the New Yorker website on October 8, 2008 in conjunction with an article entitled 'The Rationality of Panic' by Steve Coll.)

19th C. Paris - NYC: Pictorial Evidence

Hell's Kitchen and Other Stories

Last night I met up with Gabriella - a friend from Pembroke, who is also in New York. What's so hilarious\bizarre about seeing her out here, up to pretty much the same thing as I am (job-hopeful quasi-paid internship, rent free apartment, fresh from university bug eyes) is that at college we were constantly mistaken for one another. It went far beyond a joke: to the point where strangers were arresting me for ten minuet conversations at The Turf about this and that. She explained it was the same with her. Her apartment is in this abandoned Wherehouse in Queens really near the metro stop 40th St and Lowery . By wherehouse, I mean the place has dumper trucks outside and the first two floors are art storage. But on the thired is her apartment: with a giant rooftop that faces out towards Manhatten. Inside the cecilngs are the same as those in school - that's what I mean by wherehouse-y! Well, one thing lead to another and we ended going back to the city and going to the Beatrice Inn. I had no idea about the reputation of the place: but it was certainly a lovely bar with illicit dancing in the back. Only in retrospect do I recall the big fuss of back patting the door guy, and knowing nods. 

Oh and the photographs are of this rather wonderful film still shop, which I discovered on a stroll through Hell's Kitchen earlier that day. The window that wasn't filled with collages of old movie posters and little dolls was stacked with a messy pile of dusty boxes. I don't believe it has been open in a while. But it's right by the Film Centre, which oddly doesn't use it's front entrance anymore. You'd have thought with a foyer as good as theirs that there would have been a movement to keep it as the 'front door'. 

The Chanin Building

New York Historic Society

- and I thought I was a horder: in this museum, some one has thoughtfully collected about a hundred 'food sticks' covering the period 1932 until about 1965! Below was my fave piece of crockery. It's from the 1930s. The middle espresso cup is really the point of showing this picture. I don't know if you can see it, but it depicts a lady with long plats whacking a fallen man with a broom. For some inexplicable reason, an umbrella lies at the man's side. I don't know if this is part of a story that involves all the pieces here, but I think it's a very peculiar piece of domestic crockery. 

The museum as a whole was really nice. It had an exhibition of Victor Prevost's photographs of early New York. (Though unfortunately they did not show the original prints - only reproductions.) And it had details from the New York Great Exhibition, which looked so eery and antiquated for a show intended to display the vanguard of victorian modernity. 

The man selling postcards in the shop was fantastic.  I asked him if they had any postcards of the Prevost exhibit, and if you could go have a look at the Society's archives. Very  bored, and very skinny  with golden spectacles, he launched into a dramatic monologue: it turns out he collects antique men's clothing. He just added the top hat of Frederick Vanterbuilt's little brother, Jacob. Thrilled to the very core, he'd then used the Historic Society archives to find a photograph of Jacob, in said hat. So - he knew the collection, and said it was a really worthwhile to set aside an afternoon to peruse the photographs. Much of what they'd rescued had apparently been gained by mistake. Then , to disclose some 'exclusive' gossip, the society had recently been in a big fight with the New York Transit Museum. Their images of the MTA and its construction were rescued from a skip. He said they'd recently had the cheek to ask for them back, but, with much eye rolling, he said with a mild southern drawl: 'Wheel, you can imagine what we said!' Finger waggling and raised eyebrows aided the delivery of the next statement: 'Hell no. You may borrow them. And that is all!'

'New.York.Life.'

With the architectural excitement  typical in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's AOL Time Warner Building experience, even the view from the descending escalator has an innovative sightline. This scene was perfectly framed by a designer view of New York's skyscraping urban muscle. Clearly this is simply another mundane image from a 'Monday afternoon at the shops show'. 

The best image was the advertising. Hopefully the slogans can be made out in the photograph attached to this post. It reads (from top to bottom):  'Think. Of. Them', 'Self. Less. Gift', 'New. York.Life.' 

"DO IT AGAIN"

Completely by mistake, once I got off the subway at 42nd street, to take the S for Grand Central Station, I came across a subtle, funny piece someone had put up on the corridor. After combing the net I found some hard facts about it on a rather odd  nyc subway art website,  and the piece is by Norman B. Colp (1991). Each phrase was short (key), and pitch perfect.  The jaded ad-slogan style fought really well with a bit of wry humor and a spot of imagist poetics against all the 'happy time' doodle projects which are on the walls of the same corridor. I think the general concept of subway art is an attempt to mitigate the austere atmosphere down there. What's so successful about this piece however, is that it taps directly into how unpleasant and average such a walk, job or life tends to feel like when you're in corridor S. By contrast, when it must be well over 30 degrees and the B train still hasn't arrived, the 'jolly' scenery feels a bit like a slightly off key joke.  Incidentally, the original tile work on many of the subway stations (that cobalt blue of 'Bleaker Street' for example) are beautiful, well executed designs.  

"Ha.Ha." Woolf, V., (1912).

Today I walked a full rectangle around the city. I started uptown, with a walk across Central Park, to the tune of Giorgio Moroda. Then made my way down Madison Avenue, stopping at The Grolier Club for a nose around their exhibition of  what you could call primary manuscripts (given that it was so long ago), between Virginia Woolf and her intimate circle. Oddly it aligns them more with how you might look at a late medieval rather than the modern printed page. However, I enjoyed the connection: it released these rather familiar characters from their biographer's shackles...and made me want to learn palaeography. The whole thing was little, but exquisite; constructed almost exclusively of handwritten letters. Bar the odd Juliet Margaret Cameron, or smudgy photocopied face, it was image free. I'm unused to seeing text as the subject rather then aid of an exhibition, and all this attention to script completely doctored the way I gazed at New York for the rest of the day. Looking back, I seem to have taken endless photographs of words. 

The best letter in the exhibit is Virginia Stephens and Leonard Woolf's first collaboration. A letter to Lyndon Strachey announcing their engagement. It reads: 

"Ha.Ha."

Virginia Stephens, 

Leonard Woolf

What's so brilliant isn't just the succinct content, but the utterly bewildering tone of the letter. Almost imposisble to decipher without the handrails of back-history between this circle of friends (which you can and should look up), the letter is nasty, amusing, clever and simple all at once. Entirely personal, yet wholly literary, seeing this letter 'in the flesh' as it were, was an up there experience for the English Literature graduate abroad. 

Really I'm glad Virginia Woolf's impeccable literary reputation has taken a slight knock from the recent admonition she was a first class snob. As an icon I find her hard to bare. So it was pleasurable to see an exhibition in which her reputation took second place to the material fact of the work itself. I think Woolf's literature comes out the better for it. All this wannabe romantic clutter about her immortal genius was swept aside. Here, the focus was a dialouge of scripts rather than a cult of personality. Such a hangover from Seventies literary criticism is evangelical in tone, dogmatic in style, and tiresome to hear: Woolf as literary modernism's Madonna is an image some find hard to let go.  The constant twists and turns of her public image, at the mercy of academic vouge,  should really be a subject of critique in its own right.