Wednesday 28 December 2011

So long, farewell

It's always good to try and leave a few bread crumbs on the trail, just in case you ever need to find your way home.











Monday 12 December 2011

Monday 5 December 2011

Tough but gentle



Washing your children and their clothes at the same time.





A mum is tough but gentle. A mum also seems only to have male offspring . . .



This is England.



Obviously this is amazing.

Monday 28 November 2011

To do







Adolf Konrad's packing list, Oscar Bluemner's papers and Franz Kline's grocery list.

Wednesday 23 November 2011

Archer

"He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the gaslight of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate."

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.

Saturday 19 November 2011

Blue for you

Stunning colourways in Forest Hill. Mint humbugs, the spines of Penguin books, packets of Camel cigarettes. Another shy male launderette owner who asked not to appear in any images.







Saturday 12 November 2011

Conflict zone

This weekend's report comes to you from The Laundry Room on Hoxton Street where we caught the local washing-machine repair man at work (he declined to stop for a photograph). Points of interest include the sign on the wall offering £100 as a reward for any information that could help lead to the arrest of a gang who frequent the launderette and occasionally force its closure.













Impressive driers.

Thursday 10 November 2011

Sunday 6 November 2011

Inner

“The first two weeks after her return represented to Mrs. Peniston the domestic equivalent of a religious retreat. She ‘went through’ the linen and blankets in the precise spirit of a penitent exploring the inner folds of conscience; she sought for moths as the stricken soul seeks for lurking infirmities. The topmost shelf of every closet was made to yield up its secret, cellar and coal-bin were probed to their darkest depths and, as a final stage in the lustral rites, the entire house was swathed in penitential white and deluged with expiatory soapsuds.”

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth.

Wednesday 2 November 2011

Partir


Chapter 14

Quelle heure est-il?

Words of approval and praise -Words dealing with railway travel -Present tense of partir to leave, and sortir to go out -Expressions of time of day.

"Against the backdrop of the metro our indiviual acrobatics seem to play a fortuitously calming effect in the destiny of everyone's daily lives, in the law of human actions summed up by a few commonplaces and symbolized by a strange public place -an interlacing of routes whose several explicit prohibitions ("no smoking" defense de fumer, "no entry" passage interdit) underscore its collective and ruled character." -Marc Auge



"In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd ;
Petals on a wet, black bough."

Ezra Pound

Wednesday 26 October 2011

My beautiful launderette











Images from Martin Yong; "in the launderette we have a piece of highstreet design history from the 1950s preserved for us to enjoy."

Tuesday 25 October 2011

Service

With a smile.
Which means
I will
Scoop out
the (invisible) dirt
From the milk
I have foamed
just for you.
Like some Dada renegade
I spoon air from air,
Asking forgiveness as I do.
You do not deign
To pour
So wait
Until I realise
That is what you want.

What did your last
Slave die of,
Weak elbows?

Sunday 16 October 2011

Tea-cosy

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog's blanket and the tea-cosy. I can't say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring -I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn't a very good poem. I have decided my poetry is so bad that I mustn't write any more of it."

The openning lines of I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. One of the best first passages of all time.



Kitchen sinks and soap. My mother used to wash the twins in the kitchen sink.

In other news; fetch-light - a name for the 'corpse candle' supposed to be seen before a person's death travelling from his house to his grave.

Wednesday 12 October 2011

Spoiling the view


La Villa Madamma, Rome, 1778


Washington Street, Manhattan, 1936
From the very brilliant New York Public Library Archive.

Tuesday 11 October 2011

Outgrowth

"your homecoming will be my homecoming"
e.e.cummings

"And it is the tension between these two terms, an inside and an outside, which little by little becomes the continuation of an inside, that the appropriation of space takes place. As a result the neighbourhood can be called an outgrowth of the abode; for the dweller it amounts to the sum of all trajectories inaugurated from the dwelling place."
Pierre Mayol/









(Ingrowth?)