The floors of Paris

via MessyNessyChic.

Paris match

Messynessy is a cool, only vaguely hipster guide to offbeat and kitschy things worldwide, but it is particularly strong on Paris. See, for example, this guide to the French capital Wes Anderson-style which features heavily one of my own favourite Parisian discoveries, the amazing Musee de la Chasse et Nature – the Hunting Museum. Read my full report of it here.

Elsewhere, the site has a guide to the city’s nightspots curated by one of my current faves, Franco-Hispanic troubador, Adamanowsky.

Sound of the underground

Images from London’s fun-looking and chekily-named hip hop club night, “Its a hard cock life” featuring performer Prince Kongo (above).

Shit London

Other than my own guidebook to  Bangkok, this is my favourite current travel book; its a celebration of London’s drab suburbs, tacky neighbourhood stores and general shitness – but from a place of love.

  

There is also a website here.

   

Auf Wiedersehen Deutschland

Domestika

Trips to Germany are different for me that to anywhere else. Instead of being out and about, submerging myself in the local culture on the streets, I’m coccooned in it at D’s family house. Hamburg is about playing with the nephews, eating salami in the sunny little kitchen, sleeping in and going a little bit cabin-crazy. I barely really saw the city. A night out at the clubs was cancelled and replaced with a game of Xbox with D’s friends. Amsterdam was briefly glimpsed as a haze of bright lights and cute little shops by the canals for an anniversary dinner. But most of the holiday was spent at home,contentedly lazing…and raiding some old family photo albums:

     

  

Greetings from Germany

  

So far on the Germany family trip: sick kids, leaden skies, squirrels playing on the lawn and Kimbra playing on the radio (as well as endless Adele and Natasha Bedingfeld), 3.5 degrees days, steak and sausages, an infuriating (although above, occassionally cute) husband, failing at Super Mario and some fun shopping. More to come!

The Electric City

When I first arrived in London at the start of my trip, the skies were blue and clear. It was December but not too cold, I actually found the air clear and refreshing. I was staying in an old Georgian terrace house, on a street full of them, around the corner from Portobello Market. I would go down the street, stopping for a coffee or a chorizo roll a vendor was selling (delicious!). The market was buzzing with funky clothes stores and little cafes. Posters advertised Kurdish film festivals, and cool-sounding nightclub events, and new pop stars. A West Indian man dressed as Santa Claus was playing a steel drum.

At night I would ride on the second floor of a double decker bus -a novel sensation -into Oxford Street, through phantom-like neon Christmas decorations and thronging crowds, or stop at the internet cafe along the buzzing, late night Arab strip on Edgeware Road. I visited museums and parks and art galleries, and flicked through my Timeout listings guide: the options were endless. London seemed so vibrant, and yet also so cute – with its double decker buses and its red phone booths and its leafy squares. And it was so “happening”, everyone was here – like the centre of the universe. There were crowds everywhere radiating energy. I was hooked; and spent the rest of my trip in Europe looking forward to my return.

At the end of the honeymoon, I tagged along with Daisuke (who had a conference there) for another weekend. Arriving at London City Airport, I had to take the train into Hyde park, where we were staying. It was drizzling and grey and as the train glid over the Isle of Dogs and through the East End, my mood dropped. This was a whole different cityscape, one of carparks and warehouses and huger construction sites where the city was being ripped open and it seemed, clumsily stuck back together ; huge, drab housing blocks alternated with grim streets of Victorian tenements; hard-looking and mean, with not a twig of greenery in sight. Above them towered new, and hardly-more-appealing, fortress-like condo developments. Everyone on the train was wearing tracksuits and grim expressions. It started to rain. We passed the huge, grotesque Milennium Dome – gargantuan, alien looking and hideous, glimpsed from the train through a frame of passing junk yards. I got off, lugging my heavy bags and tried to exit – only to be told that the ticket I’d purchased from the machine was somehow invalid. I was fined 20 pounds by a gaunt, sallow man with appalling teeth. I went to drown my sorrows with a large Pepsi and big Mac, standing under the harsh fluoroescent lighting of a handy McDonalds, and I looked around at the similarly depressed faces all around me, a United Nations of bad skin, all wolfing down their greasy burgers. Wow, I thought. London sucks.

I felt like the city had kicked me in the guts, or it was a huge soulless machine, utterly indifferent. One that would grind me down then spit me out.

And yet, by the end of the day – after a successful sightseeing foray to Southall (see below) – I was in love with London again. At its worst, I have no doubt London can be soul-destroying. Living in a shitty (yet overpriced) studio in one of those windwept, uncared for estates, commuting daily through surging crowds and shitty weather; just the thought depresses me. But there is something about London that saves it – a wild card. Perhaps it is randomness, and unpredictablity, and its huge variety. Its a city that give you anything if you care to look, and can knock you senseless if you let it. I get the sense that you can never “know”  London, never get it cornered. There is so much bubbling away in its different corners, sometimes blissfully unaware of each other and more often colliding, and melding in new and unexpected ways, like experiments in a chemistry lab. For no city in the world perhaps has given so much; its music, its “look”, its humour (sometimes harsh, often gentle), its language … and there is always something new around the corner. London has an electricity all its own.

Blur – London Loves

Britain Mutates

The one thing about London that struck me the hardest – whether in good neighborhoods or bad – was the babble of different languages, the swirl of people. Because EVERYONE is in London. As a Chinese-Australian friend and her Sri Lankan-Australian boyfriend had told me, its not a big deal where you come from in London, because everyone is from somewhere else. Literally, almost every person had a different accent; Italian, Pakistani, many I couldn’t trace. It has to be the most cosmopolitan city on Earth. All of Europe is here; they come from Gdansk and Kiev to work in shops, and fly in from Moscow and Dubai to buy up half of Kensington. They pour in on Easyjet, from Bergen or Madrid, to go shopping and see a show. Italians swarm over the Underground, and Scandinavians clog up Oxford Street, young children in tow. Twenty-somethings from Madrid/Lyon/Thessaloniki/Bucharest come to study English and work as waiters. Thrusting young professionals flock to Europe’s highest-paid jobs, in the City. The faces on the subway are black, brown, Mediterranean, veiled. I saw a platinum-blonde, punk Arab lesbian complaining loudly about her girl troubles, and stood behind a middle-aged woman in Boots in her fur-lined Winter hijab.

Of course there are communities from Britain’s former colonies; Indians and Jamaicans and Nigerians and Bangladeshis; but also ones I hadn’t expected; Vietnamese in Hackney, Moroccans in Ladbroke Grove, Congolese and Somalis in Haringey, Brazilians, Colombians and thousands and thousands of Poles.

Look at these language learning kits I spotted in a bookshop in Bayswater; Korean, fair enough, but Farsi and Zulu (!!!)
I loved that about London. It’s the new Babel.

LNDN

London fun

The British capital might boast the most vibrant and varied nightlife scene in the world, – from heaving super-clubs to  hipster-cool art student nights in scruffy pubs – but I didn’t sample any of it. Indeed, I left Europe with the sad record of not having visited a single club anywhere during my stay. Getting old sucks 😦

But Daisuke and I did find other ways of having fun. On our first night in London we wanted to organise a reunion of our scattered diaspora of our UK- resident friends. We chose “Cargo”,  a Shoreditch bar/restaurant,  as the venue. Not knowing the city I was relying on my guidebook, which described it as a cool fixture on the East London scene; but although it was very nice (and suited our purposes beautifully) I was disappointed to find it much like the bars at home in Australia. Comfy couches in the dim lounge, wooden outdoor tables on a grafitti-decorated terrace ( I spotted a Banksy). I could have been in Melbourne. Admittedly the buzz around the place was a year or two old – I guess the real cool crowd had moved on – but for a supposedly hip hangout in hipster-central in one of the world’s most style conscious cities, it left me a little underwhelmed.

The following night was better. We got invited by one of Daisuke’s friends to go out, and ended up in posh Bayswater in a  retro-kitsch 1950s style diner and bowling alley (a bit Pulp Fiction),  reimagined as a classy London bar; and spent the night bowling with a real English “‘lady”‘ and a Greek set deisgner, whicle a funky DJ spun the tunes, sipping on Mint Juleps. We had a great time.

And the next day, my very last in London, I was in for a real surprise. Daisuke’s work colleagues were having  lunch at a Soho yumcha eatery, and I joined them. My golden rules for choosing Asian restaurants are ; go where Asian people eat, and that the more a place spends on their interior decoration (generally) the more tasteless the food is. The Soho restaurant, Yauatcha, smashed through both these barriers. It was  glamly styled and packed with white Londoners, and fabulous. You enter through a minimalist space  with orchids and vast crystal-clear tanks of gliding tropical fish, and then descend to a lower levelof candles burning in cross-shaped alcoves on the walls, and discreet fairy-light stars sparkled across the ceiling.  And the food: it was superb, probably the best Chinese food I have ever eaten. The Dracula-minimalist-Orientalist decor turned out to be  the perfect accompaniment to sweet, gamey but still light Venison rolls, succulent soft shell crabs cooked in garlic and chilli flakes, congee and amazing shrimp and mango rolls. I would recommend this place to anyone going to London; it’s not cheap, but sooooo worth it. A total London highlight.

Thank you to Dave and Daisy …

…who gave me a bed  to sleep on, a London A-Z map book (invaluable!) and fed me real English kippers (at my request). I had wanted to post up a picture I took of Dave, Daisy and my other cousin Will eating their kippers (well, except for Will who is vegetarian) but photobucket has mysteriously (and alarmingly) deleted a roll of my London pics, including that one. Bummer. But thank you, and much appreciated!

British Museum and the Tate Modern

London of course has some of the most famous museums in the world, and I visited two of the biggest. At the British Museum I went to see the collection of African art, including this famous piece which I had seen in picture books as a teenager: a 16th century ivory pendant belonging to the Queen mother of Ife (in Nigeria now). It is one of the most famous and beautiful pieces of African art and it was a little thrill to see the original:

The famous Benin bronze heads, and leopards, were nice too:

Outside the African collection, the top of my hitlist was this piece; the (in)famous Crystal Skull – inspiration for Indiana Jones. Long held to be a mysterious Aztec masterpiece carved from quartz, recent tests have shown it conclusively to be a 19th century European fake. Possibly embarrassed, the museum shoved it away in a little hard-to-find corner. I had expected it to be thronged by crowds and highly publicized, but instead it was treated as an embarrassment, barely acknowledged and left forlornly alone. Personally I think the successful fraud makes it interesting in itself.

The second big museum I went to was the Tate Modern, a cavernous contemporary art exhibition housed in a former power station. I wanted to see “PopLife” ; a celebration of pop art featuring the works of Murakami, Keith Haring, Jeff Koonz and Takashi Murakami among others. One exhibit was a giant golden room playing disco music and covered with super-sexualized images of black people. The next room had a collage of dozens of examples of “sexy Nazis” from movies. After that  (the best piece I thought) was a room empty except for a (plastic, but eerily realistic) dead horse.  And in Takashi Murakami’s section, a video played of Kirsten Dunst in a blue wig dancing through Akihabara to “I’m Turning Japanese”. Jeff Koonz had sex with his porn star wife, as depicted by a twice-real-size sparkly sculpture, in a separate ‘adults only’ bit.

Even as a fan of pop art,I have to admit the show wasn’t very good.

This was much better though, all the more so for being unexpected. I wandered into this exhibition under the railway tracks near where I was staying at Ladbroke Grove; it was ‘wicked” (to use the local parlance), everything London should be: grafitti, suspended man-eating bi-planes, dogs made of dollar bills and triceratops-cars, pole-dancing babies, and lots and lots of ridiculous haircuts in attendance. Top marks.

London is Super!

If London to me is a bubbling caudron of different races and disparate fashion trends, splashing out new and interesting ideas, then surely the current London bible is this: my new favorite magazine, “SuperSuper”.

Its a riot of eye-bleeding fashions, charmingly frank articles and interviews with UK artists I’ve not (yet) heard of – but I love it.

The fashion director and cofounder of the magazine is a blindingly charismatic girl called Namalee, who has developed into a cultish hipster icon. I totally want to be her: she is a tour de force of astroboy-trash-chic in eye-watering nu rave colors, with an eloquent,  conversational writing style and now, a music career . Not content with being a writer/editor/stylist she has started to release tracks (which are mostly, awful, but accompanied by riotous, self-referencing low budget videos in which she reads SuperSuper in the bath among other things). Somehow the bad-ness of music just makes her cooller.

Half-Sri lankan, half-Dutch, smart, opinionated, achingly “now” and eccentric to the hilt; what could be more London that that ?  I love it.

Here is one of the songs and artists recently championed by the magazine. Feel that SuperSuper vibe!

Fuzzy Logik Ft. Egypt – In The Morning

The London Sound

For someone who grew up reading NME and “The Face”,  London has a pretty strong claim to being the world’s musical capital. I had thought it would be fun to catch an up-and-coming UK act while I was in town – the kind that hasn’t broken out yet, who we would have to wait for in Australia, but plays in London every week.  But I was to prove out of luck. MPHO and the Noisettes did a (joint) gig the week before I got there. Basement Jaxx and Micichu out of town on tour ( in Australia!) Hotly-tipped for 2010 soul singer Rox had no scheduled performances, and old favorites Primal Scream were in hibernation. So I guess it was not to be.

But most diappointing was that I missed an exhibition of artwork and photography by my current obsession, the fur-hatted folky-emo-soul singer Lightspeed Champion. It closed the day I arrived!

But the good news is there’s a new album out at the start of February. Here’s the single:

Lightspeed Champion – ‘Marlene’

London gay

Silhouetted Buddha in the window of a Soho sex shop.

London has gay Indian clubs (“Club Kali”), electro-hipster bear nights (“Beartronic, for urban bears and cooler cubs”), a gay taxi service, a gay Hungarian restaurant and perhaps most interestingly of all, it historically had its own gay language. “Polari” was a colorful slangy dialect which developed amongst fishermongers and circus performers and was taken up as a gay code. Amazing. It has most died out now, but there is still this: a huge cut-out of naked-from-the-waist-up Brian Harvey (of tragic 90s boyband East 17) peering out of a shop window on Oxford Street. There’s an interview with the artist behind it in this month’s “superSuper”. (It is an anti-censorship statement apparently.)

Southall: London Indian

 

Southall is the hub of London’s huge Indian community. It draws immigrants from other places too, but it is dominated by the Punjabis, as you can tell the moment you arrive at the train station, about an hour West of the city’s centre.

Interestingly, the UK’s subcontinental communities are quite disparate; the Bengalis hang out at Wehitechapel and Brick Lane, right on the other side of town. The social differences are stark too: one interesting figure I read was that while average incomes for ethnically “Indian” Brits now actually exceed that of white Britons, ethnic Bangladeshi/Pakistanis still lag substantially behind.

Southall is an interesting place with its music shops blaring bhangra, (not to mention the cars cruising down the main street), two Sikh gurdwaras, and the offices of the world’s largest circulation overseas Punjabi newspaper. But it is dominated by one building, and an unexpected one at that:

 

The Himalaya palace was built in the 1930s as a wildly exotic Chinese temple picture palace. Who would’ve excpected this in drab outer London? It is fabulous. Now (of course) it screeens Bollywood flicks.  Sadly the one I wanted to see (guess why?;) wasn’t screening yet:

Duffy – Warwick Avenue

I drove past Warwick Avenue tube station in a taxi and had this song stuck in my head for days afterwards!