Graham Sutherland's art inspires me; Francis Bacon's drives me to seek counseling.
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
Elbow Celebration
Insults I have endured thus far:
“Elbows are so bomb!” — something somebody actually said.
“Regina,” the Latin for queen, pronounced by our British tour guide to rhyme with “vagina.” I noticed. I laughed. No one else did.
- “Eat cunt!” (yelled at me by a young British lad from the window of a white limousine near Picadilly Circus)
- “Wait in line like the rest of us, you tossers!” (or something thereabouts, yelled at me and Ben by some British douche bag who thought Ben and I were cutting in line when we weren’t, the douche bag)
- “Boisterous, loud Americans” (a label we unjustly earned on the tube from some German-speaking douche bags who didn’t realize our program’s mole, the German-born Antonia/Tracy could understand everything they said)
“Elbows are so bomb!” — something somebody actually said.
“Regina,” the Latin for queen, pronounced by our British tour guide to rhyme with “vagina.” I noticed. I laughed. No one else did.
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
Breath of the Marbol
I know it’s high culture and historically significant and all that, but walking through gallery after gallery of nobility portraits is like flipping through some yearbook from London Aristocrat High, circa the sixteenth century. How can I expected to feign interest when even the portraits look bored? Then again, any museum that houses the likenesses of Samuel Pepys and David Bowie or Queen Elizabeth and Twiggy can’t be all that bad.
Everything in England smells like grandpa breath.
Everything in England smells like grandpa breath.
Saturday, July 12, 2003
Gloucester Station
We stand without speaking, just like the locals, just like good Americans. Clacking and roaring like a roller coaster.
Bump. Sway. Fluorescent flickering.
The whizzing black interrupted by the occasional beer-yellow safety light slows to a halt, and the scenery changes to the station: more fluorescent lights, flooding the sterile tile platform like the set of some urban movie.
Stand up. Sit down. Shuffle around.
Now we’ve got a new group of friends on the journey home, but God forbid we try to talk to them. A youngish mother has youngish daughters — not twins, but dressed identically like she wishes they were. An old man stares at those girls and I don’t like the way he’s looking at him. In the car behind us, a man who looks like Mimi Bobeck reads the newest Harry Potter and occupies his seat like an overripe pear squished into a shotglass. The station starts inching away again, then runs, then blurs into that blackness that I don’t like.
No one’s sitting directly across from me, and I can see my reflection in the window, shadowed by the whole lot of nothing behind it. I would have never imagined Gloucester Station — one of those overlit tile platforms without garbage bins that I only began frequenting a week ago — would make feel like I was home, but it does. My feet hurt and I wish I was there now.
Bump. Sway. Fluorescent flickering.
The whizzing black interrupted by the occasional beer-yellow safety light slows to a halt, and the scenery changes to the station: more fluorescent lights, flooding the sterile tile platform like the set of some urban movie.
Stand up. Sit down. Shuffle around.
Now we’ve got a new group of friends on the journey home, but God forbid we try to talk to them. A youngish mother has youngish daughters — not twins, but dressed identically like she wishes they were. An old man stares at those girls and I don’t like the way he’s looking at him. In the car behind us, a man who looks like Mimi Bobeck reads the newest Harry Potter and occupies his seat like an overripe pear squished into a shotglass. The station starts inching away again, then runs, then blurs into that blackness that I don’t like.
No one’s sitting directly across from me, and I can see my reflection in the window, shadowed by the whole lot of nothing behind it. I would have never imagined Gloucester Station — one of those overlit tile platforms without garbage bins that I only began frequenting a week ago — would make feel like I was home, but it does. My feet hurt and I wish I was there now.
Friday, July 11, 2003
That Don't Impress Me Much, Either
Good God. This is the longest I've gone without seeing "The Simpsons" in my life. Shania Twain has a concert in Hyde Park tomorrow. Somehow, that doesn't impress me much as the Cindy Sherman exhibit at the adjacent Serpentine Galley.
Wednesday, July 9, 2003
Armitage Shanks
Just when I think it’s sunk in, I realize it hasn’t and I’m a stranger again.
The novelty of living in this old city never struck my mind more sensationally than when the spit flew from the mouth of an Shakespearean actress on landed on my forehead. The construction of the Globe affords me the privilege of groundlinghood — I’m standing with my stomach pressed against the stage, the cast of an all-female production of Richard III screaming, crying, and dueling no more than six inched from my awe-stricken face. The actress playing Richard defies the confines of gender with a malicious grin; the actress playing Anne, who would be pretty if she didn’t have the nose of the pigfaces from that “Eye of the Beholder” episode of the Twilight Zone, is the one whose saliva has splashed on my head. Her Anne is both dignified and pathetic. It was the second performance of a Shakespeare play at the reconstructed Globe within twenty-four hours, the previous being an all-male Richard II. I never thought I could like the history plays like this.
I live among the unnervingly wealthy here. The bitchy, British judge from American Idol shops at the grocery store we went to the first day. We saw him. The Dutch embassy is our next door neighbors. They’re nice people, I’m sure. Our front window looks out onto Hyde Park, a sprawling green better than any strip of brush we call a park in the States. Aside from the palace within the park, there’s a golden statue of Prince Albert — ahem — and the Serpentine Galley, which is presently featuring a show by Cindy Sherman.
The flatmates are good, certainly better than I expected from a school that admits cows into its undergraduate program. Some of them suck beyond the telling of it, but mostly I’m happy.
In the interest of conserving the flat’s most prized resource — toilet paper — I braved the bidet today. Webster defines “bidet” in a way that makes me smile: “a bathroom fixture used especially for bathing the external genitals and the posterior parts of the body.” Truthfully, I think the toilet’s little sister is a fixture made only for women. The male genitals hang in such a way as to be teased annoying by the bidet’s stream of water. While the stream does clean the desired parts, it strikes the seldom-stuck region to the rear of the nut sack in the process, causing an unpleasant slap-slap-slap that does not make me smile. I think Bidet Town is an area of the European lifestyle I will leave uncharted after all.
And most impressive above all these things: I learned how to use the tube without getting lost.
Where do I go from here?
The novelty of living in this old city never struck my mind more sensationally than when the spit flew from the mouth of an Shakespearean actress on landed on my forehead. The construction of the Globe affords me the privilege of groundlinghood — I’m standing with my stomach pressed against the stage, the cast of an all-female production of Richard III screaming, crying, and dueling no more than six inched from my awe-stricken face. The actress playing Richard defies the confines of gender with a malicious grin; the actress playing Anne, who would be pretty if she didn’t have the nose of the pigfaces from that “Eye of the Beholder” episode of the Twilight Zone, is the one whose saliva has splashed on my head. Her Anne is both dignified and pathetic. It was the second performance of a Shakespeare play at the reconstructed Globe within twenty-four hours, the previous being an all-male Richard II. I never thought I could like the history plays like this.
I live among the unnervingly wealthy here. The bitchy, British judge from American Idol shops at the grocery store we went to the first day. We saw him. The Dutch embassy is our next door neighbors. They’re nice people, I’m sure. Our front window looks out onto Hyde Park, a sprawling green better than any strip of brush we call a park in the States. Aside from the palace within the park, there’s a golden statue of Prince Albert — ahem — and the Serpentine Galley, which is presently featuring a show by Cindy Sherman.
The flatmates are good, certainly better than I expected from a school that admits cows into its undergraduate program. Some of them suck beyond the telling of it, but mostly I’m happy.
In the interest of conserving the flat’s most prized resource — toilet paper — I braved the bidet today. Webster defines “bidet” in a way that makes me smile: “a bathroom fixture used especially for bathing the external genitals and the posterior parts of the body.” Truthfully, I think the toilet’s little sister is a fixture made only for women. The male genitals hang in such a way as to be teased annoying by the bidet’s stream of water. While the stream does clean the desired parts, it strikes the seldom-stuck region to the rear of the nut sack in the process, causing an unpleasant slap-slap-slap that does not make me smile. I think Bidet Town is an area of the European lifestyle I will leave uncharted after all.
And most impressive above all these things: I learned how to use the tube without getting lost.
Where do I go from here?
Thursday, July 3, 2003
Somewhere Over Moose Jaw
Holy shit. “My plane just landed in LONDON.” “I’m going through customs in LONDON.” “Uncle Andy’s picking me up in from Heathrow Airport in LONDON.” “I’m taking a bath in LONDON.” “I’m getting drunk with Kiwis at the decidedly American-Ozzie Outback Steakhouse… in LONDON!” I’m fucking here. On a new continent, on a new country, in a new city, on my uncle’s laptop while he and his Polish girlfriend share his bedroom. Holy shit. I have to repeat it. I made it here on my own. I didn’t accidentally board a flight to Libya. I wasn’t deterred by being situated between a monolingual German frau and a narcoleptic British dowager on the flight. And I didn’t get spurned by the hateful customs agent at the airport. Somewhere over Moose Jaw, it hit me: I am making the biggest step forward of my life. A lingering question: why did Uncle Andy’s flatmate Barry ask me what the age of consent for homosexual sex was in the United States?
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