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."

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?

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.

Spoiling the view

La Villa Madamma, Rome, 1778


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

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?)

Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist's show at the Hayward. Stare at a crystal ball nestled in the folds of a handbag, listen to a shell tell you about her answering machine, try not to tread on the angry fairy trapped in the floor. Dapple in the sunlight projected in the loo. Look for videos in the leaves of lettuce, stare up at three hundred pairs of pants reaching out accross the sky. GO AND PLAY.