Space

Tina Modotti and Umbo, my picks from Moma this summer.

A Coney Island of the Mind

Corn dogs, summer sun, and sea gulls the size of dogs. Being where the sea meets the city is sandy and gritty. I ate a mango on a stick and thought about eating a knish.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti said it better,

"The pennycandystore beyond the El
is where I first
fell in love
with unreality
Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom
of that september afternoon
A cat upon the counter moved among
the licorice sticks
and tootsie rolls
and Oh Boy Gum

Outside the leaves were falling as they died

A wind had blown away the sun

A girl ran in
Her hair was rainy
Her breasts were breathless in the little room

Outside the leaves were falling
and they cried
Too soon! too soon!"

Making do

I am reading a book called Austerity Britain by David Kynaston and have come accross this marvellous moan from Vere Hodgson, a welfare worker in west London in March 1949 (capitalisation model's own). "Oh for a little extra butter! Then I should not mind the meat. I want half a pound of butter a week for myself alone . . . For ten years we have been on this miserable butter ration, and I am fed up. I NEVER enjoy my lunch."

I feel entirely blessed and will hurry home to have toast and butter for lunch. The book is made up mainly from the records of the Mass Observation movement who asked lots of interesting questions (eg. "What are your feelings about housework? What do you consider to be the six main inconviniences of present day living conditions?") and who rigorously observed the most compelling experiences of everyday life. They observed the cinema going public and noted that "whereas men tended to weep at moments of reserve, women wept at parting and loss". If I were parted from my butter ration I would indeed weep.

Dawn

Dawn is overrated. But the first train is always a godsend.

“The breath of the moist earth is light around its unexpanded buds.” –Shelley

“The regularities of the metro are obvious and well established. Both the first and the last metro perhaps draw some poetic allure from being seen, thus assigned an immutable place in the order of everyday life, the two being symbols of the ineluctable character of limits, of the irreversibility of time, and of the succession of days.” (Augé ,28.)

Froth

Couchette and launderette . . . The same last four letters. A coincidence? I THINK NOT.

It's worrying that this is what gets me excited these days.

I have been frothing milk for more hours than I have been doing anything else this weekend. But look where I get to do it . . .


I really really want to buy a van just like it.

My hipstamatic dont lie

Dan the egg man

I am inordinately happy to finally be reading Daniel Spoerri's An Anecdoted Topography of Chance.

I will share with you the second footnote on the first page.

"The author, off and on for about three years, has been so preoccupied with the preparation of an "eggcyclopaedia" that many of his friends call him "DAN THE EGG MAN". The book will explore the subject through such fields as advertising and alchemy, biology and business, cartoons and cookery, dancing and destiny, fables and feathers, garbage and games, happenings and hygiene, incubation and intriuge, journalism and juggling, the Kabbalah and the Koran, limericks and lapis lazuli, musicology and medicine, noodles and names, optics and orgasm, prophesy and poaching, quackery and quattrocento, radioactivity and ribaldry, sturgeon and sculpture, taboos and tattoos, vaginal stimulation and VIRGIL, warbling and WITTGENSTEIN, Yiddish yarns and yoga, zombiism and Zen, to pick a few categories at random. I myself caught the egg bug from the author, and after a month of intense and pleasurable research srrounded by my books at the Chateau de Ravenel was able to hand over to him more than 115 prime egg quotations in German, French, English, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Latin."

I would like nothing better than to spend the rest of my life researching "prime egg quotations". The only one I can think of now is that Dan managed to convince Tash that it was illegal to freeze eggs . . .