Englanding #16 : Extra Brighton & London Content

Well, it turns out that I have a bunch of good snaps from Brighton and London and it would be positively criminal of me not to share them with your good selves. Thus, the Brighton pier that you can't go on:


God, people must love taking pictures of that thing. I kind of want to write an action movie in while the final punch up takes place on it. Awesome. As well as a burnt-out pier, while in Brighton you may also come across the gentleman with whom I'm drinking here, Robert:


He is a scoundrel and a cad and please treat him as such. We saw Fantastic Mr. Fox, which is very good but I have no idea who it's pitched at. It's essentially an animated film in very much the same vein as Wes Anderson's other movies but made a little simpler and with no swearing... y'know, for the kids. Then again, I don't really care who it's aimed at, I really enjoyed it.

Here's where the spies live in London:


Place on the left that is. And here's my touristy tube snap:


Trains that go under the ground?! Sapristi! There could be a whole civilization down there!

Englanding #15 : London again - Turner Prize Atomization

So basically on the Friday: Tate Modern and down to Brighton. On the Monday: back to London and Tate Britain for the Turner Prize exhibition. I've always wanted to go to the actual Turner Prize show since, as I said on Friday: modern art makes me want to rock out. Your mileage may vary, but I really liked this years shortlist. In reverse order of which I liked best (oh, photos thanks to the Guardian!):


Lucy Skaer had some nice pieces, but nothing struck a chord with me at all. I did not want to rock out, thus I did not really rate it.


Enrico David's work I kinda liked. Actually his actual, physical work I was on the fence about. He had some great pieces and some that I found really lacklustre (they were all wonderfully displayed though on a kind of black art-stage.) What I really dug about his work were the themes he dealt in: not just the difficulty of human communication but almost the impossibility of it. It ran through all of his work in the curious clumsy shapes of the figures, and even the placement of each work as they occasionally obstructed or supported one another.


The last two were really difficult for me to pick between, they both seem to be geniuses. Richard Wright paints directly onto the walls, and is inspired by the space in which he works. In this case that brought the intricate gold leaf work above, and a smaller more unobtrusive piece. After each exhibition the walls are repainted and his works are destroyed, which is... dizzying.


So the best for me was Roger Hiorns. That pile of dust right there? An atomized passenger jet engine. Atomized. I have no idea how you even go about doing that. He also made several wall pieces that included brain matter and famously filled an entire flat with blue copper sulphate crystals so that they covered every surface. I would have loved to see that, but as it is - atomized passenger jet engine? I'm officially rocking out over that.

Englanding #12 : London Town

London! The man who is tired of London is tired of paying too much for a chocolate bar and being treated like scum while he's paying for it!

I kid, I kid, but in this case not because I love. Without ever having lived in London I've been there so many times that I wasn't expecting my trip there to be much of an eye opener. But while I still put London in the same bracket as Tokyo (awesome to visit, wouldn't want to live there) it impressed me a lot more than I thought it would. For some reason living in Japan made the architecture and the buildings of London seem really beautiful and interesting this time out. I felt the same in Birmingham, but then Birmingham really is very familiar to me whereas going past St. Pauls and seeing business like this:


...was really fun. I let myself be more of a tourist than I ever have before down there and wandered around with my backpack on taking photos of tube trains and stuff like that.

Still, worth mentioning that when I first came back to the UK people said, "well, everyone's gonna seem really rude aren't they?" They didn't until I went to London and Brighton! Down in London almost (not quite) everyone in the shops and cafes was magnitudes ruder than the other places I visited. In London though, you've kinda gotta be, and the customers they were serving were a damn sight nastier than those people deal with in Birmingham I'd reckon.

So on my first day in London I met up with young Ben Green, who's doing very well, in the leafy borough of Hackney. After I'd taken my leave of him I went to probably my favourite place in the capital - Tate Modern:


The first time I went to the Tate Modern, a power station converted into a massive modern art gallery, I think it took me two days to go around the whole thing. Seriously. Two days. As Eddie Argos sez: modern art makes me want to rock out. The turbine hall installation at the moment is this enormous terrifying void:


How It Is by Miroslaw Balka is a giant metal box facing a blank wall so that no direct light can get in. In fact, once you're up that ominous looking ramp and inside it feels like no light at all can get in, you're just stumbling around in a huge pitch black box bumping into people and worrying that any minute the floor is going to drop away. There's no sense that you're progressing, or even getting closer to the back, until you finally reach it. The walls are covered in felt too. Awesome.

More modern art on Monday!