leaves

california christmas

2012-01-22T03:42:00.000-08:00

Mom got a eucalyptus wreath for the front door, because she said she remembered I like the smell. Usually we enter the house through the garage, but when I do use the front door, I can smell the wreath, and I feel touched. I don't even realize this until I am driving with Jamie. On a quiet Californian highway, I suddenly feel so appreciative for mom's eucalyptus wreath.

The sun is out most days. I would lounge in the driveway with a book; it was like high school. I was reading Time of the Assassins by Henry Miller and eventually it was driving me nuts. All this talk of God. But by this time I had begun stockpiling books for the New Year:

In Youth is Pleasure, Denton Welch
Murphy, Samuel Beckett
I Remember, Joe Brainard
The Diary of a Nobody, George & Weedon Grossmith
Rebecca Solnit
Roger Deakin
Susan Sontag
Roland Barthes again
Jude the Obscure,Thomas Hardy
...

I've already made a dent into this reading list, and will be happy to discuss if you're in London and fancy a coffee. On the plane home, I read Lady Chatterly's Lover, but for some reason that's still embarrassing to say. Even if I got it for 50 cents at the little shop at my parents' local library?

Besides the eucalyptus, my mom brought in dill pickles and red wine and thick cut chips and crispy chocolate cookies.

Mom and dad took us to Whole Foods and to Trader Joe's. Jamie and I went to a frozen yoghurt shop where they let you sample all the flavours, and then you choose one and pile it with any toppings you want and it is priced by weight.

In San Francisco, which sometimes gleams and sometimes seems so empty and depraved, as always, we saw our friends' art, Colter Jacoben at SFMOMA and Edward Loftus at Gregory Lind. I am still beaming with pride to be associated with both. It is a brilliant feeling to genuinely admire work made by friends.

We drank hand drip filter coffees, incredible. Blue Bottle, Four Barrel. There is nothing like drinking coffee on holiday. Maybe coffee in a new city is even better. But this coffee, wow. I wish I had brought some back.

At Jesse and Robbie's pad in Oakland, they've written love poems to each other on the walls. They've got a friend with a singing voice like spun gold, and they all perform a Sting song with a Siberian harp, and Robbie even does some throat singing. There is a drink with mint leaves in my hand.

I'm like, only in California, and then on New Years Day, everyone is in a meadow amongst wise oaks and rolling hills and taking their tops off, even the women and I'm glad to be in California again with, you know, expressive types and lesbians who make their own pickles. And later, on the patio over Bloody Marys, one says, Do you think this is what your friends in England imagine California to be like? And I'm thinking, actually, I guess they picture, you know, Beverly Hills. Not really so much this moment.

The night before, there was hip hop and howling. We were in a ranch on a wildflower preserve. This sounds peaceful, and it was, but on New Year's Eve, this particular ranch was on fire with the echoing gaiety of queers. I waited by the side of the dance floor for ages, a wallflower. The dancing was so good, it was like the dancing from the original Fame! When I finally got up the nerve to join in, the bassy booty song ended and a slow song came on and someone pushed me to dance with a handsome man with a big beard and suddenly it was a slow dancing game called Snowball where everyone had to slow dance and switch partners when someone shouted "snowball." Yes, there was a moment just a couple switches in, where I was the odd man out, in the centre of the floor. Surely this is a cliche scene from a half dozen sitcoms. It was my Charlie Brown moment.

Later, I attempted a shameless return for more, when "Real Love" by Mary J. Blige, but Jamie wouldn't budge when I tugged. And I got hurt feelings and had a strop. Suddenly I was out in the dark at the edges of the property, along the road, having a pee. Cars are terrifying in a silent black night: The people in cars that passed me must have thought I was crazy. I didn't realise they were driving so fast because it was so close to midnight. It happened to be just before the countdown that I found my way back to the house, and in the middle of kissing couples Jamie kissed and (I think) forgave me.

A few days after New Year, we were in Santa Cruz, the beach town where they filmed The Lost Boys. We went on the Monarch trail but only spotted a few butterflies. Smelled the Eucalyptus. Saw the sea, and a boy riding his bicycle backwards. We went to a Brazilian cafe and all the waitresses were Brazilian hotties with beach bods.

Things we ate in California include: Homemade pickles, peanut butter pretzels, tacos, burritos, lashings of Chinese food, sushi, margaritas, cinnamon bears, west coast ales, Burmese samosa soup.

In the glare of the sun, fat from food, I wondered if I wanted to go home.

But it's funny, arriving back in London always feels like coming home. More than coming back to San Francisco ever did when I lived there. We circled above central London as I never have before, at least not on a clear sky. I was besotted. We were in one of those seat rows that's kind of between windows. So we strained. And still, I yelped like a puppy at the sights. Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament! The London Eye! Tower Bridge! St. Paul's! It looked amazing and unreal, like the board for some magical board game called LONDON!

We were tired and smelled like airplane and we were hungry after not eating very much plane food. But I felt ready to play the game.

Our first evening back, I was putting the stuff in our suitcases away. Everything smelled like airplane. Then, bitten by the new year bug, Jamie decided we needed to rearrange all of our furniture.

It looks much better now, so please come over and make yourself at home. We dropped a speaker, though, and we've got an unfixable fuzz if things go very high or very low. So forgive me while I fuss now and again with the sound.

But do come over, I'm sure we haven't told you everything about California.

walls

2011-11-29T15:46:00.000-08:00

A large piece of watercolour paper, a sharp-tongued and lazy Yucca plant, a fantastic painting by Virginia Phongsathorn. (Hurry home from Paris, Virginia!)

At home now near midnight with Tom Ravenscroft on the radio. Jamie's wearing his hat on in the flat; it's getting colder. Earlier tonight, Mur Murs at the Barbican went down a treat! (I love you, Agnes Varda, I love you, Los Angeles.)

two teenagers

2011-11-22T11:22:00.001-08:00

In the middle of the night, I'm thinking about being a boy and at Sara's house. And her teenage brother who was very cool and had thick spectacles was sitting in the backyard in shorts with his legs crossed, playing with his leg hairs. And I said, your brother is counting his leg hairs!

And then I'm thinking of another cool teenager, and he played Peter in the play of The Diary of Anne Frank. And the Frank sisters both loved him and so you felt he was the type to fall in love with. He was stoic and I remember he wore a necktie as a belt, the length of it dangling at the side of his thigh, and he wore smart sweaters and was handsome and was reading a paperback of The Clan of the Cave Bear, which was popular at the time. That was in the moment that I passed him in the lobby of the theater, and I swear he smiled at me. I wouldn't even have thought that someone like that knew I existed!

He wound up shooting himself in the head. I was maybe 12 years old and none of us could fathom that. Especially when someone said, just think, his poor parents, when you do that, someone has to clean up the mess, because your head splatters on the walls. I guess his dad had a gun? I had friends who were crying and hugging each other but I didn't know him so I wasn't meant to cry and hug, so I just thought about it. And someone else said on his wall he had a Smiths poster, "Shoplifters of the World Unite," I think.

I've written this down before, I'm thinking, but it keeps coming back into my head. The waste, and that he must have been a beautiful person. And that my memory of him ends the same time as everyone else's. Never even went to college, let alone go bald or do something adventurous, or make a thousand more mistakes.

jean and jenny

2011-11-14T11:35:00.000-08:00

I used to take their names for granted, Jean and Jenny, my mum and sister, respectively. I guess I thought they were common, plain even. As I grew older and my attentions turned focus on simpler things, I realised they were two of the loveliest names. So Scottish sounding; indeed, both are heroines of Belle and Sebastian songs. Names like sans serif fonts: Without unnecessary flourish, letting the true character of the named fill in the design. Soft but almost handsome names, authentic and modestly sweet. I came up with the idea of tattooing one name each on my wrists, but they were a bit like, more tattoos? So I keep their names close to me in blood and not ink. "String Bean Jean" and "Photo Jenny." How proud I am of the women in my family, and deeply am I cherishing their gentle names.

play of the week

2011-11-13T02:01:00.002-08:00

Jamie found this little gem. It has some wonderful moments, and is worth a viewing.

we live here for the music

2011-11-08T12:54:00.000-08:00

People are always asking me, why do you live in the UK? I finally thought of an answer: We live here for the music.

houses

2011-11-04T14:51:00.000-07:00

Peter Aldington is a British architect whose Modernist houses subtly uplift, rather than negate, the villages in which they are situated.

It is a difficult quality to quantify, and I was most positively reassured when Jamie came across books on Aldington's work at Mark and Martina's house. He looked at the pictures and plans for ages and proclaimed, "these are my dream houses."

For weeks, I had been gazing at a book on Aldington Craig and Collinge at work, and pretending the calm interior on the cover was the home I would be returning to at the end of the day. I had been wanting to show them to Jamie, to see if he agreed.

The houses bring a warmth to Southern England housing, without imposing something out of place. There is almost a hint of the Californian about them, but they still feel perfectly British. Like you'd be listening to Nick Drake inside, with a pint of a cask ale.

autumn in the kitchen

2011-11-04T13:56:00.000-07:00

A wooden spoon dyed turmeric
Like outside the window, leaves dropping
Yellow is determined
To stain the year with season.

saturday sun, pt. 2

2011-10-30T15:21:00.002-07:00

This Saturday, on the River Colne at high tide, with a view of the lovely Wivenhoe.

Impressive fireworks over the bank of the river after nightfall.

saturday sun, pt. 1

2011-10-30T14:48:00.000-07:00

A Saturday walk on the heath, under a bright autumn sun and atop very crunchy leaves. Jamie said it's like walking in a bag of crisps. We stopped by the Keats House first, felt like we were in that movie.

A Sunday afternoon of Edward McKnight Kauffer posters at the Estorick Collection. We walked there with Jimmy, Lucy and Pete via the New River, a hidden gem.

wuthering heights

2011-10-14T13:37:00.000-07:00

When I was a schoolboy, this book changed my world. It made me realise England as a bigger place than the cities I listened to in Smiths songs; it made me daydream in terms of heartache and candlelight and ghosts and damp and the moors. I took from it a woman's perspective that felt honest and rich and unhindered by the expectations of a woman's "proper" place and point of view. It felt outsider. It was a book I felt I could smell. And I would think about Heathcliff, what it would mean to be him or to love someone like that. I am feeling incredibly optimistic about a film version that is raw and hand-held and draws from the elements of nature. I am very much looking forward to seeing this new take on a "period film." It has been described as being like a kitchen sink drama set on the moors. I have high hopes that this film might help define my winter.

London Planes

2011-10-14T01:01:00.001-07:00

We're back in London and Jamie's got his boots on and the soles are wooden and they clack down the pavement and Jamie says, That's such a satisfying sound. Isn't it? But you probably don't realise the full of it, making the sound is how you get the real satisfaction.

We were on a balcony on the 25th floor in dazzling Hong Kong, and we were talking about the mighty skyline. The buildings are designed using feng shui principles, spiritual balance mixed with a bit of money grubbing and showmanship. IM Pei's elegant tower has spikes on top that pierce the clouds of the money gods. Only slightly more practically, Norman Foster's HSBC building can be broken down into 12 parts and shipped back to London. (It was built during the changeover amidst speculation of financial uncertainty.) Towards the south of the island are the towers with large holes in the middle. Several floors in each are hollowed out. This design sacrifices valuable real estate, in order to allow the dragon to move through, from the mountain into the sea.

Back in London, we're riding the overland through a sprawl of brick and leaves to Richmond Park. We're heading to spot trees. We're mapping it out, guided by The Great Trees of London book.

We've been waiting for a crisp and clear autumn day, Jamie calls that kind of day clement; they're due but there's a lingering wave of summer heat. Which is making everyone jolly but secretly I'm ready for clement.

Our chosen day is right for it. A grey sky cracks open and a bright sun shines through. But at the same time, it's cool enough to wear a wool jacket. Richmond is a postcard, a stately village moist from the waters of the West Thames.

We find thousands of great trees and four official Great Trees. The first is a Stone Pine called The Maids of Honour, a rare species around here, peeking over a wall on the grounds of the former Richmond Palace, off the southwestern corner of Richmond Green. We walk through the palace grounds, now posh housing I suppose, and a kindly sign points us towards the Thames politely. It is only around the bend that we spot the Asgill House Copper Beech, again viewed over a wall, described on a plaque as a perfect tree. It would be nice to be 200 years old and perfect.

Just a bit further along, growing through the deck of a badly decorated restaurant, is the awesome Riverside Plane. The species makes up some half of London's tree population, but they are anything but common. They were brought into the city as resilient warriors of green; their large, shiny leaves wash off the grime of pollution easily in the rain, and their camouflage-like bark peels itself off in chunks in order to keep fresh. The Riverside Plane is the tallest of its kind in the city. "The kind of tree that makes you giddy to look straight up the trunk into the heart of it," says our book. "...You get the feeling this tree could just keep going on and on."

It's impressive without feeling overbearing, incredibly tall and unassumingly handsome. Surely an architect would strive to create a skyscraper with that kind of effortless grace.

Into the park and we march along to what must be our favourite find, the Richmond Royal Oak. For one thing, you can climb inside. You look up through holes in the trunk and it's a wonder. It is short and fat, with a view over a heath and two ponds. It's a storybook tree, a gatekeeper at the edge of a forest, a wise and modest character who imparts warning about the dark secrets ahead, a secret keeper, a friend. There's a bench nearby and when we sit on it together, close and alone on this day, this clement day, I wouldn't rather be anywhere else.

The day rolls on; rooibus tea and veggie pies, even. In the heart of Richmond Park, with its wide vistas and gnarly trunks, you could be on top of the Sierras. But there's signs of flatness, of urbanity along the borders, of Britishness. There's the White Lodge, home to the Royal Ballet School, begging to be used in a horror film.

And I've never seen the Red Deer before. Magnificent; the adult males are ready to rut. Their full antlers and puffed up chests keep us at a distance. A boy crouches in the weeds taking pictures; I hope he isn't too close. He seems to be having a stare down with a powerful patriarch. The stag is sat slightly apart from his grazing herd. The boy seems to be having a moment, a primal feeling perhaps. Surely he's got enough photos by now. Maybe he's waiting for the two stags sat down the hillside to gather up strength for a proper battle.

We're not rutting today ourselves. We're getting on fine. We end the walk with a pint, of course. Ale, outside where you can see the water. The Thames sits elegantly. A week ago, we were looking out on the choppy waters of Victoria Harbour in a near-typhoon. We made it home despite, to this river flowing steadily, almost imperceptibly, through London.

zoo kid and charlie brown

2011-09-17T01:28:00.000-07:00

Carl and Kate said he reminded them of an Atherton Lin character. It's lovely to know, because we never reveal our characters' faces, people have their own face types in mind. I see Atherton Lin kids all the time. Sometimes it's the hat or the walk, but sometimes it's a face. Sometimes, a face will really surprise me as to how much it fits my imaginary world.

The characters, originally invented as an homage to Peanuts, are barely visible in the 2012 calendar. But we hope you feel their presence. We could never decide how to draw their faces, so we decided to hide them. Now they're hidden even a bit more, and the world we have created has to do with a perspective and a point of view.

The song gets more beautiful the more you play it. Zoo Kid is reminding me of Slits, early Specials or Clash and a bit of Billy Bragg, and it's exactly what I want to hear right now.

And here, a man who really knew how to draw a face.

sunday reading list

2011-08-21T12:33:00.000-07:00

Our combined reading list, indulged in lazy pieces after the obligatory summer swim and visit to Columbia Road Flower Market:

Cabinet, two most recent issues
Flash Art, latest issue
What Am I Doing Here? by Bruce Chatwin
Mi Won Kwon's beautiful essay about Felix Gonzalez-Torres
The Vegetable Book by Jane Grigson for dinner preparation
Writing Home by Alan Bennett (Today on Columbia Road, I found the same paperback edition which Jamie was reading when we met)
Wildwood by Roger Deakin

In the afternoon, rooibus tea was taken with homemade savoury scones flavoured with cheese and rocket pesto, delightful!

Song of the day: "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)" by Melanie and the Edwin Hawkins Singers

We hope that you had a good Sunday, too.

a donkey on the canal

2011-07-08T00:43:00.000-07:00

Archival photo from the wall at the Canal Museum, near King's Cross.

armchair travels part two

2011-07-06T10:53:00.000-07:00

Sitting on the floor at Daunt Books, looking at the less browsed titles piled up on windowsills and on the bottom shelves, I came across this. Jamie and I are both drawn to books that were published right around the time we were six or eight years old. Surely, this is a very literal recollection of the picture volumes we were looking at as children. But it was a handsome era for books like this. You can imagine the kind of subtle shifts in typeface and layout that followed in the next generation of such books: a kind of wispy quality that made the publications seem noncommittal. Anyway, this book of evocative large format photography was in perfect condition and I couldn't resist bringing it home.

Coincidentally, I recently read a Bruce Chatwin story that references Wales which cracked me up. It has that oddball delightfulness that Chatwin does so well.

At dinner with Diana Vreeland

Her glass of neat vodka sat on the white damask table-cloth. Beyond the smear of lipstick, a twist of lemon floated among the ice-cubes. We were sitting side by side, on a banquette.
'What are you writing about, Bruce?'
'Wales, Diana.'
The lower lip shot forward. Her painted cheeks swivelled through an angle of ninety degrees.
'Whales!' she said. 'Blue whales!... Sperrrm whales!... THE WHITE WHALE!'
'No... no, Diana! Wales! Welsh Wales! The country to the west of England.'
'Oh! Wales. I DO know Wales. Little grey houses... covered in roses... in the rain...'

armchair travels part one

2011-07-06T10:36:00.000-07:00

I've only left the house today once, to take the recycling out. I dipped into a few letters by Rimbaud, what a brat. But mostly I've been reading about the Great Bardfield Artists all afternoon, and wanted to encourage you to pay a virtual visit to Saffron Walden to drop in on Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Kenneth Rowntree and the rest. I feel I've got to better educate myself on the creators of 20th Century British aesthetics, including of the great murals and tiles of London's tube stations. And Rowntree's bucolic dusks make me weepy. So the Fry Art Gallery is a future destination, certainly, along with Kettle's Yard in Cambridge (which will conjure an image of Kettle Chips in my head until I've actually been there to see the real thing). Jamie's wanderlust is more far flung.

gentlemen on the canal

2011-07-05T13:36:00.000-07:00

I can't stop looking at the watercolours of David Gentleman. He trained at the RCA under Edward Bawden and Paul Nash, and went on to make some very British pictures. Weirdly, I feel as though I live within his London, even though his iconic renderings of the city are from the early '80s. We bought a copy of David Gentleman's London (1985) from the used bookshop in Camden (where I believe he still lives), and then took it back onto Regent's Canal. We found the exact spot behind King's Cross Station from which he drew the canal. We were taking photos for our own canal illustration project, and we kept running into a man (no, I don't think it was him) sketching the landscape in his pad. Wanting to share Gentleman's image of the canal here, I did a Google image search for david gentleman regent's canal. I couldn't find the drawing I was looking for, but bizarrely came upon one of my own photographs, which I took of Jenny and Jamie on the canal and posted to this blog on March 23, 2008.

a roman road

2011-06-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

I left my Oyster card at home. I feel my pockets, pointlessly because I know. But, I think, rather than go back and get it, I'll just walk. I'm thinking of that photograph I saw of myself not so long ago; I looked, I'd say, thick in the middle. Lucky I wasn't tagged in that one. But yes I could use the exercise. And maybe something will unwind in my mind, I think, as two buses pass and I walk.

I'm going to be walking the Roman Road, I tell myself, which these days is split into different street names as it passes through neighbourhoods that are hot or has been, washed up, up and coming; it's a route through which art types and nightclubbers have walked for years now. And still amongst them, the immigrant groups and the city's labourers. It's a Roman Road, I tell myself, and still barber shops advertise the '90s Ceasar haircut, and various gelled up styles that nobody has anymore, but I guess they do. This road is dotted with male haircut cards like Hollywood Boulevard and its cinematic stars. The Hollywood Walk of Fame. Jamie has always fancied the haircut men. We call them cheap models, along with the boys who model clothes for JD Sports and Peacock's. Very cheap, that one, I'll tease him as he glances. And often he fancies the Turkish barbers. They look swarthy and sweaty. Some are hanging out the doors and windows now.

I'm thinking about my melancholy, and about how forgetting my Oyster card might be the cure. Because it's making me walk. And then I think melancholy and oyster, are those words both in the title of a Smashing Pumpkins album? (I just looked it up: It's actually a Tim Burton book.)

Ermine Street is what is was once called; that was after the Romans, in Old English. Look it up. I don't know my history but I know this route well, have known it since I moved here, from the opposite direction then. It's where I bought things I needed for the bathroom. I've seen bands play up and down this road. I've never kissed anyone on this road. Not long ago, I fell and landed on my chin on this road and it was really bad and people stopped to check if I was ok, which was nice. When we first moved here, I took the bus ready to go and dance. It's when you could drink on the bus. Down to where it hits Old Street, which really is an old street, you know. That's the very first crossroads of London. Now if you want to dance you go back up to where I used to come from.

I've stood on this route on innocuous summer days, bored. Oh, the luxury of that boredom. I remember Jamie taking a picture of me on one boring day, waiting for the bus; I think on our way to something benign, a barbeque? A maybe barbeque. We were newer in town, it was a fresh start. Every single day felt like maybe.

Just last weekend, I lost something somewhere on this route and that's what I'm thinking about today, and wondering if there's any possibility I could ever get it back.

Walking forward I'm trying not to regret.

Past the mosque and a crazed woman is terrorising a young mum pushing her pram. Can you yell at a young mum like that? Can you do that? "Motherfuckinwhore," she yells at the woman with the pram. I glance back. She wouldn't dare become violent, would she? With a baby, or two, there? I glance back but everyone is probably thinking the same thing: This will amount to nothing. An apparently more well-to-do mum, also with her pram, gazes vaguely at the ruckus with the hint of a smile on her tired face. She may be thinking I'm lucky that's not my life. But she's on the same street.

Up the street, things begin to smell of incense, and then the raw stench of the sea: The young fishmonger has got a moustache and his jeans are tucked into white Doc Martins. It's a good look for a fishmonger, no?

Without a pen, I try to remember shop signs: The notion of "new" gambling at a betting shop. "New roulette." It seems to promise better luck. One sign says, "Fantasy Unisex Hairdressers." What does it mean?

I'm carrying some of our cards and notebooks over my shoulder. I'm going to drop them off at a quiet and pleasant shop and get paid for them. I arrive and the friendly shopkeeper tells me her laptop was stolen a couple weeks back. And she chased the kid out of the shop but she was barefoot, and what could she do. Life has become so complicated on returning to her small old laptop. I see a display of beautiful hand-drawn plates and I'm tempted to request part of my payment in trade. A peacock, and a grizzly bear with the caption around the rim: "What you leave... I EAT!" Who does those? I ask. James just around the corner is the answer. It's on my wish list now. Yes, I think the bear.

I get a couple of looks from cute girls, I think. "It's always an awkward one," Kyle used to say about girls who give looks. When I was with him, he got all the looks, being as many years younger as he was inches taller than me. When they think you're straight, we talk about that. Complimented, of course. Once a girl insisted Kyle could be mistaken for straight and he said, "Me? When I open my mouth, my handbag falls out."

But when I walk past schoolkids I think to myself, don't look at me. Don't look at me. It would just take one to think my jeans are too tight. I don't want to hear the noise of kids yelling, certainly not at me.

So I stop at the gallery and ask, I was just passing by, have you found my thing? They're all being really nice so I try to be relaxed and not say have you found my thing, it's got really important stuff. Instead, I feel like I'm talking in slow motion. The girl giggles at me and we say bye.

But looks can be deceiving. Even this girl I met recently, and I had decided was perfect, she said something in passing the other day, about how when you go deeper, you find the mess. And then when gays are thinking a girl is looking... Well, we were hanging out once and one gay guy said about girls looking at him on the train, and how they're thinking he would give me good babies. And Jamie's sister cried out, you think that's what we're thinking?! Touché. We were drinking Fruli. And on the other hand, someone else I thought was looking at me defensively, and two days later she asked me to hang out. So.

On the way home, I cut through the square with a name like Sartre's lover. I could be in a European suburb, I'm thinking. Except the boy behind me is so typical London. In his straight black jeans, plaid shirt of dark greens and shoes that must be either dirty white plimsolls or faded grey desert boots. One or the other. I can't look back too much to decipher. That'd be staring. So I can't tell you exactly. He's on his mobile speaking with the confidence of a boy who looks like all the others. I wish I looked like that. Long and just slightly wide in the middle, sand coloured and scruffy, just like all the others, and I bet he's got a pair of RayBan Wayfarers somewhere at home if they're not stepped on and broken, and I bet in the winter he wears the same clothes, only maybe with an olive green Barbour. The kind with the shape that you can wear if you've got better shoulders than me, like he does. I've got the one with structure at the shoulders to compensate for my stoop. And, stupidly, I've got it on now; it's actually become warm. It could be mistaken for an actual summer afternoon. Could it be L.A.?

And I'm thinking yes the walk did do me good. I walk over the canal and wish that I had someone with me to go to the Towpath Cafe. You know who. Yes, I'd stop on the canal and it would be so bourgeoise to drink something with foam.

Could it be L.A.? Not when you're scanning for The Shard or The Gherkin to make sure you're turning down the right streets. And not on dirty Hoxton Street, where a sign for a Jamaican jerky joint advertises Guinness Punch. I walk past a salon like a sigh and inside, a black girl sits in front of the mirror, her face absolutely fallen from boredom, her hair sticking straight up while her hairdresser attends to something else. I bet she wouldn't want her friends to see her hair like that. I wonder what she'll look like when she leaves.

I think it was different walking past windows in San Francisco. Everything is magical, enchanted there. Like Stevie Nicks kept saying on the radio the other day: Magical, enchanted. The hell with it, I'm here now. It's a different kind of pleasure. Bigger, wider. There's more room for the drab in-between bits. London, it's like real life on a map.

One last stop, bread. Then to home where I will try to avoid letting sadness sink in. (I'll wind up doing stuff in the kitchen to Bob Dylan, the usual. Just fine.)

The woman at the bakery, as always, calls me young man. Will she call me that forever? I count out one pound twenty in change.

we're vegetables

2011-05-28T01:27:00.001-07:00

In the shower, I was thinking, well I guess it hasn't been our year. But then, what would you say about last year, or the year before?

But then, as always at this time, they make their proud appearance: Asparagus, broad beans and peas. In the garden, but I don't have one; so I see them first in adjacent tubs at the grocery shop, and in recipes with mint and cardamon and clove.

At Mildred's, the vegetarian restaurant, under a skylight fitted with chirpy plants that look like punctuation marks, sat one of the most striking looking young women I've ever seen. With her orange hair and freckles she looked like a carrot. I called her Carrot Cake Jane Birkin. I'm sure I'll see her soon on some magazine cover.

Jamie's been putting some stuff in his hair that's got carrot oil and lavender stem. I am worrying in the shower, and the soap has herbs that promise to refresh and relax.

Maybe you shouldn't think about life in the shower.

All the best conversations happen in the kitchen, don't they. Ours is pretty small but still when we have guests they tend to stay in there as long as possible. Of course one of my favourite kitchens is the rustic one in the cottage on Quilter Street, with the door that opens onto the garden. It's always becoming midnight in there. It's always red wine that's spilling onto the heavy wooden table. The closest we have to an argument is debating whether it was A River Ain't Too Much to Love or Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle that we were listening to that summer.

Asparagus with lemon, with peanuts, with grated pecorino or melty stichelton.

I remember when Ben first pointed out to me, asparagus makes your pee smell funny. People say, it makes your pee smell bad. But surely I'm not the only one to think it's kind of nice. Earthy. And either way, it makes you delighted: My pee smells funny!

We saw the Fleet Foxes play and they could be a band of vegetables. A rhubarb stalk, a bean sprout. The drummer with the golden voice, a bunch of radishes.

There's an outbreak of people becoming sick from leafy greens and it makes me sad that vegetables are going to waste.

At the close of one of the hottest days of the year, Jamie says, when I walked past the Towpath Cafe, people were eating humongous artichokes.

It's later but still light out, and after some wine we venture out, how can you stay inside, and find the Towpath Cafe still open, so we drink some more wine from stemless glasses, on the plain barge with benches they've moored on the canal. We bob a bit on the water. A breeze is picking up. We have to go pee in the bushes. It's like camping. Up by the bike rack against the wall, in the bushes. The pretty tattooed girl at the counter and the bearded boys in the adjacent kitchen are battling it out with their different music selections. The girl is singing along to Laura Marling. The boys have got on some corny soft rock. It's magic; drinking on the water makes it feel like a different city. A wetter, more relaxed city. You see the bridges differently. It's June now, summer is really here.

the wind

2011-05-22T11:20:00.001-07:00

The wind is overeager today. On the path that cuts through the cemetery, everyone was squinting eyes and covering noses, in order to avoid all the floating bits of tree. I wore sunglasses, which I rarely do, as protection against the storm of stuff. I've seen couples on the towpath stop, and the one will try to get fluff out of the other's eye. It hurts!

This month, we saw Bill Callahan singing "The Wind and the Dove" at the Barbican and the play I Am The Wind at the Young Vic Theatre. I combined both experiences in an essay about the use of banality and repetition in songs and plays, but I'm not going to publish it here, it's too boring. Just listen to the song. And know that if I was a drum kit, I'd like to belong to Bill Callahan's drummer, because he plays with bare feet and wearing a tie, and gently, barely hits.

We look out the window across the street, and I'm like those guys look like they're on heroin. Jamie's like, those guys look like they sold their souls at the crossroads.

We're thinking of starting a collection of pictures of windows.

Our windowsills are so dusty from the upheaval of the winds.

Jamie says he likes a candle in the daylight, so I make sure that he's got one lit on his desk when he draws.

Bob Dylan is turning 70 and Britain, it turns out, loves Bob, and there's all these programmes on Radio 4; we listened to a good one called Bob Dylan and Me. And I'm like there must be a reason for me to mention this and then I'm like, oh yeah, "Blowin' in the Wind."

And finally another song, "Beyond these Chilling Winds" by Larry Coryell, one of my secret treasures, from an album I bought because I liked the cover. It's a great song for the end of a late spring day, when the fog rolls in and brings the barbeque indoors: Red table wine in a stemless glass, a bit heady because you switched to wine from beer, and candle wax dripping on wood surfaces, and bits of herbs on the kitchen counter and the refrigerator stuffed with hastily wrapped leftovers.

Sometimes summer steps back a bit, unsure of itself, and the sky clouds over. And you're like, bummer. But at least you can stay in and get some work done, and not feel so obligated, like it's sunny, I've got to get out while it lasts. So you're inside on a flat spring day, and from the east, an amazing silvery light floods the kitchen and spills into the lounge.

orford ness part one: rocks

2011-05-16T00:55:00.000-07:00

In Tunstall Forest, a few rocks here and there. The beginning of a creeping alien feeling. Patches in the woods ripe for spaceship landing; cosmic and grotesque looking rocks. The one on top looks like a brain. They freaked us out too much to collect, so we just laid them out for this photo.

On the bleak shore of Orford Ness, Jamie shouted against the wind, this is like purgatory. But I was in heaven: so excited about the beauty of the rocks that at one point I was on my knees practically braying like a donkey.

A red and white lighthouse and pitch black and concrete structures, the remnants of furtive bomb testing scenarios, punctuate a flat horizon. The few structures that remain will be left by the National Trust to decay at the hands of the elements. W.G. Sebald wrote of Orford Ness, "I imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilization after some future catastrophe."

Myself, I was happy for the moment on Orford Ness. I do enjoy a bleak and abandoned landscape, and those beautiful rocks. But a melancholy lingered. The sky turned grey just for our trip to the Ness. The clouds puffed up and threatened.

According to Sebald's understanding of local lore, "Even the beach fisherman, who were no strangers to solitude, had given up night-fishing out there after a few attempts, allegedly because it wasn't worth their while, but in reality because they couldn't stand the god-forsaken loneliness of that outpost in the middle of nowhere."

The pub where we stayed, just across the skinny river in the contrastingly quaint and picturesque town of Orford, is called the Jolly Sailor. Just a short boat trip from despair, and a landlubber stakes a claim in the ground called Jolly. Perhaps the sailors were at peace because they weren't, for the moment, on Orford Ness. Perhaps they were jolly because tomorrow they sail away.

fingers make early flowers

2011-05-12T12:05:00.000-07:00

Sweet Williams from Columbia Road Flower Market. Normally maybe I wouldn't go for such a tight looking flower, but Sweet Williams have a lot of personality, like if they were in a Disney movie they'd sing in the rain. Little April Showers. It's also good to let them trickle all over the house: They are bunches in our bathroom, bedroom, on the kitchen table and windowsill. Little spots of colour. Jamie put a tiny few in a tiny jar above the stove, which I didn't notice for days.

By the way, as for for that well-used wick on the windowsill, I would like to take this moment to recommend the humble unscented candle. A plain church pillar is a simple joy. If they're made of a decent beeswax, they come with their own laid back, neutralizing scent. The expensive perfumed and branded candles just seem a little corny, even though some of them smell real nice, like grass or spices and so on. But I just leave that experience for the shop; I browse the scent. At home, we light some Paine cedar incense instead, when we have it. Or we just open the windows: When the sky is a bit drizzly, it's disappointing in many ways, except the way the wet spring air smells. Wonderful.

Fresh veg from Broadway Market. We are enjoying Isle of Wight tomatoes this season! Yes, the flowers from the wild garlic were put in a jar, as pictured above. I think Jamie learned flower arranging from his mum, who had this simple approach: Put lovely little flowers in little jars in special places.

Happy green growth on the canal. The evenings are long now, and a canal walk is surely in order as often as possible. We've seen fluffy little goslings and signets, surfing the ripples made by their protective parent geese and swans. Everyone on the towpath stops to coo and say look at that, how cute, rocker dudes and proper ladies on bicycles alike. Spring brings people together, and people lower their guards, don't you think.

If you're also feeling optimistic and at one with the natural world, I highly recommend this beautiful picture book. It's got pride of our place at ours right now, kept on a small table next to four rocks we collected in Dungeness, and leaved through regularly. Calming, especially when taken with a cup of your favourite tea.

some april inspiration

2011-04-26T07:56:00.000-07:00

Two women on our minds today, as we work on our 2012 calendar:

Warja Lavater, early progenitor of the artist's book, who used shapes to tell stories (such as Little Red Riding Hood, above).

Phyllis Pearsall, inventor of the London A-Z. You should read this little biography. It would appear that she was totally rad.

rock music

2011-04-26T03:08:00.000-07:00

Things from the banks of the Thames, as featured in the June page of our 2011 calendar. Jamie then turned the rocks and pieces of glass and petrified things into this sculpture, which sits near our records and stereo.

gill sans meaning

2011-04-25T05:26:00.000-07:00

It should come as no surprise that others are feeling the same pressure we are: What to do now that the ubiquity of the Gill Sans font has reached a sort of uncomfortable zenith? The thing is, it was always meant to be ubiquitous, wasn't it, especially in Britain? Elegant, functional and somehow both regal and common at the same time. It's the font equivalent of the stiff upper lip. It practically apologizes for itself.

Jamie and I had already been discussing how a variation or customization might somehow be in order. We love Gill Sans, but now that it's become a default to this extent, a go-to, it's usage begins to appear lazy, or without deliberation. Then we came across a satirical article published in the newsletter of clothing company Old Town. The article humorously points its finger at the KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON phenomenon for damaging the font's credibility.

It's a dangerous accusation. Gill Sans generally stands for credibility. It's the kind of aesthetic that makes you buy things from Labour and Wait, even though you know they're priced up imports from rural France, Scotland and so on. Their name, writ in Gill Sans script, implies a sense of selection and authority; it bestows the framework of good taste.

On Redchurch, the East London street on which Labour and Wait has re-opened, the Gill Sans signage heralded a kind of stately preservation of the local market heritage. Then consider the huge Aubin & Wills which opened across the way. "Exclusively for the discerning," the clothing company boasts. Or any public schoolboy, anyway. I like Aubin & Wills' jumpers, don't get me wrong. I find it hard not to be charmed or at least bemused by a company that uses a fox in a top hat for its logo. And I've tried to be optimistic about the upscaling of Redchurch (which I once considered my own little back alley, with its funny secret galleries squeezed between foreboding vacant storefronts): At least it's APC and Aesop moving in, not Zara or Pret a Manger. But at any rate, the presence of Gill Sans up and down the street now seems to signify gentrification more than authenticity.

Jamie and I have consistently used the font from the start. "Very British," our most fontiful friend, Carl Williamson, commented. For us, perhaps more than the air of credibility discussed above, it's always been intended to understate itself, to render certain design elements invisible as we focus on the watercolour, narrative and handwriting in the work. Like Helvetica does for so many, but with a rural British accent. The example that springs to mind is Richard Long's use of the font in his graphical works, which point to ephemeral earthworks, journeys and conceptual experiences. The font is evocative because it is invisible.

So, what to do? The Old Town article offered up an alternative in Cooper, the quite kitschy, very rounded, very '70s typeface. I'm not sure if they were taking the piss, but recently I did put the word shoegazer into Cooper, just to see how it looked. I also coloured it bright pink.

I'm not in the position to proclaim the death of a beautiful, classic font. And indeed we don't have any intention of abandoning it ourselves. But we are thinking over the implications of its usage in a new light, having seen it's significance changed in the last few years. I believe time will uphold the stately, timeless look of the font. But in the moment, we've seen a font that implied open meaning become threatened to be rendered meaningless.

interior

2011-04-19T01:34:00.000-07:00

Some time back, we received an email requesting to photograph our house. We went on the website and the other people's houses seemed so fancy that we just got intimidated and didn't respond to the request. If you are reading this, sorry about that.

This morning I took some of my own photos on Jamie's camera. Jamie says my hand must shake because they're blurry.

A good soundtrack to these photos would be "At Echo Lake" by Woods.

Over breakfast. I waited for Jamie to look down, because he wouldn't have been happy about me photographing puffy morning eyes. You can see a peek of our Nigel Peake poster. The diving helmet is a gallery flier for drawings by Ed Loftus. It takes him like a year to make one drawing. We do use our own calendar, above Jamie's desk, but in the kitchen we use the calendar that my parents make every year. For this month, there is a photo of the volcano in Hawaii. The postcard is Wolfgang Tillmans.

That's an original by the wonderful Colter Jacobsen. It is a pretty detailed rendering of a newspaper photograph of marathon runners, drawn in two different markers found on the street. The sock monkey, made by Lucy, and the stuffed bunny are constantly finding new lovey poses. The vintage coaster set features three different birds. It sits on an end table/magazine rack that we got for £6 at the shop near the station in Wivenhoe this weekend.

I had been looking at the P.W. Elverum & Sun website. These days, I generally put things into my life to make me feel cheered, as I have been going through a rough patch. I spent an afternoon looking through the backlog of The Guardian's This Week in Wildlife photos. The ribbon (1st place) was found by Tara Sinn in the California desert, and she customized it with Sal Mineo Fan Club badges. The photographs of a boy creating shapes with panda and dolphin projections are by my cousin, Jonathan Wang. There is a very early Simon Evans watercolour, and also Todd Bura art pieces but you can't see them because they're minimalist and one's out of the frame. The flying boy sculpture and photographs from Finland are by Lucy Atherton, and Jimmy made some of the miniatures in the printer's tray. I like how there's a Peanuts book and a Wolfgang Tillmans postcard next to each other, two of my biggest influences.

When I was younger, JD Salinger was my biggest literary influence. I wrote a story that won an award and it was called Raspberry Cappuccino or something like that, and it was a rip-off of one of the stories in Twelve Stories. It was about a businessman who had to change his morning routine and this charming teenage girl in the alternative coffee shop made him drink flavoured coffee and it made his day special. When I was older and I worked in a video store, a teenage girl told me she wanted to watch the movie to The Catcher in the Rye because she didn't like reading and she had to do a book report. I told her there was no movie and she'd better march home and read the book because it was brilliant and she would be able to read it really fast. Later on, her mom told me that it meant a lot to her. We were moving out of the country and we were having a garage sale. The mom didn't really want anything of ours but she chose some mugs or something and paid extra for them. I would never drink flavoured coffee but you get the point.

Mike built these shelves when he used to live here. The burly pipe-smoking sailor was drawn by Mathew Parkin. It's a favourite.

The backlighting helps hide how dead that cactus is on the far left. The antique slide was found in Spitalfields Market.

We also bought Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book in Wivenhoe, where we spent the weekend. I always kind of make out like we'll cook together, but Jamie winds up doing all the work and I just kind of keep him company and make the occasional suggestion.

three day weekend

2011-03-19T13:10:00.000-07:00

Passing a queue of beautiful kids who must have been about to film a fashion advert or something. They have perfect skin that glows.

Looking at pictures of beautiful Syd Barrett at the gallery on Redchurch and also a few of his paintings and some love letters with doodles, which is delightful because they feel so familiar and spontaneous, but also feels kind of awful because they're not yours to look at. Holden Caulfield would hate that.

Holden Caulfield is mentioned in Richard Ayoade's Submarine and we went to see it on the first day of its release, which is typical of us. Twice through the movie, the film slipped and the image shifted partially off screen. Both times, I was the person to go and alert the staff. You have to go down two flights of stairs to get to concessions. In a way, these moments alone in the stairwell felt as much a part of the film as staying in the cinema.

Arnold Circus on the way home in a sunset light that makes you believe in atheism because only an accident could be this beautiful.

Bruce Springsteen in a v-neck t-shirt on an album cover on the floor in the lounge.

We're watching that Danish crime series now, and that's the kind of thing you want to do when you have a horrible cold, which Jamie does, poor thing. We skipped an invitation to drink Mojitos with gays.

Discussing, instead, closeted homosexuals of European history, with which Jamie has developed an interest.

Those are my favourite flowers because they last over two weeks and the needles smell like citrus when you rub them between your fingers. They make our place look like it's in the mountains.

We're really in the middle of London.

At Paul Rothe & Son, the man in the apron says, until recently we used to only make traditional coleslaw. It was only 20 years ago that we gave in and started making the stuff with mayonnaise that they sell in the grocery stores. I ordered the traditional style.

We were running for the bus, and Jamie goes, This Is The Most Fun I've Ever Had In My Life. We caught the bus and I said to Jamie, Did you really say that? He shrugs and says when you start running, endorphins kick in.

Coming home to see my boots in the hallway, and one is on it's side, and they're in the hallway because for the first time in forever I finally felt like it was warm enough just to wear some Vans.

Starting the day off deciding I would be a good morning DJ; I'm alright in the mornings, and pretty good at selecting morning songs. My set includes: Ariel Pink, The Finches, Cotton Jones, Dirty Projectors covering Bob Dylan, Dirty Gold, Atlas Sound, Ruby Suns.

After dark, listening to Sibylle Baier. "Tonight." Listening to "Saturday Sun" by Nick Drake, after the sun has set on a Saturday.

Jimi Hendrix. Red wine. Olbas. Tealights in Marimekko vessels, given as a gift. Homemade pesto. Peanut butter pizza. Tibetan Momos. Hobnobs. Rooibus tea. Salt and vinegar crisps.

Laundry. Finally doing the plaid shirts.

The moon tonight is closer to the earth than it has been since 1992.

happy graffiti

2011-02-27T11:28:00.000-08:00

Here is a joyful and maybe gay piece of graffiti that we see on our walk to our grocery store.

amsterdam

2011-02-17T00:34:00.000-08:00

It was the first evening of spring. That's what it felt like, anyway. Really it was too early, being only the 16th of February (Jamie's birthday), and the way things are with the weather now, it will surely retreat back to winter a few times still. But for a couple of hours anyway it was the first evening of spring, and everyone was out.

It was past four in the afternoon and the air was calm and not that cold. We walked down a street of tall, proud, sand-coloured houses. "Little Mods!" said Jamie, and across the street two boys on a scooter were saying goodbye to another in a doorway. A girl was hanging about with the boy in the doorway. The three Mods had slightly different jackets and none could have been more than 5 feet 5. In their helmets, they could be plastic Playmobile men. The two on the scooter drove away but kept looking back at their friend and the girl; who knows what is the story of why their goodbye was drawn out that way. It was just a small scene in a terrific cartoon.

People riding bicycles set the pace for the streets. People passed each other rather closely in the open air that seemed to have shaken off its frost. I was warm in my jacket.

Through the windows of a corner shop I saw bottles of wine and I dragged Jamie inside where I saw boxes of pasta too. The man greeted us nicely in Italian and we ordered a box of spaghetti but changed our order once we spotted some fresh ribbony looking stuff in the counter. It's a birthday after all. The man and the woman spoke to us only in Italian all the way up to counting up the total and telling us the price and never translated anything into English or even Dutch so I just guessed and it was fine. For a moment I wondered whether it was only my imagination. I asked Jamie, were they speaking a different language that whole time. He confirmed they were speaking Italian. They were sweet and attentive and at least I had the confidence to say ciao when they said ciao goodbye.

We emerged onto a park. It was laid out handsomely. Kids on swings at the far end put motion into the air, not as high as birds.

We had seen a skate pool earlier but now we had the luck that some skaters were there. You know how they stand around the edges with the board in four fingers and a thumb between knee and foot. One good looking boy, with thick brown hair like he was going to be alright in life, gave a push into the pool and was in there on the curves for a long time, round and again with swooshing noises and a couple times he caught air and then he flew out and you could imagine that he probably had rushes of excitement in his belly.

We walked past benches and other arrangements of wood designed to make people be outside with each other. And playgrounds, everywhere. I thought back to London, which is my city, but you don't see children play like that. Skateboarding is probably seen as a nuisance or a problem. It looks like exercise here, healthy, it looks like the kind of thing you'd like your kid to do, take risks and get some air.

(Jamie has this thing about Amsterdam where he says all the bicycles seem to have been dropped from the sky, like a snowstorm.)

We found ourselves in the middle of three kids on rollerblades. Besides the rollerblades they could have been from the 1970s: The last one, the littlest, especially. In his long blonde hair and corduroys, he could have been from a Swedish film about funny kids. He was a long way behind and the redhead in the front was very fast and set a challenging pace. He had followed a slope and weaved through some ballasts and then the fellow in second place did so too. We could imagine the nervousness in the shrimpy long haired one as crossed over the bridge and worked up to the top of the slope. He rolled carefully down and oriented himself at a diagonal and passed between the ballasts accurately. It was a success for the little one but he still had a long way to go to catch up to the first or even second place. Oh well, it's still early.

Somewhere along this walk we came upon a bridge that I decided should be my favourite. It was just one of those T-shaped bridges but on this late afternoon it took on the gleam of romance. "Will you always remember this bridge?" I asked Jamie, something I've never actually said before. But bridges, I've heard, will do that to you, and finally it happened to me. Would you remember it if I took you here in 20 years? He said yes but I don't know if we could find it tomorrow.

We crossed yet another bridge, and from this one we saw the sun looking great, hung bright and low, across a squinty view of trees and buildings and water.

We came upon a small playground we'd passed earlier, with a spinning giraffe and a swing set made out of twisty pieces of wood. It sits in the hollow of apartment buildings, like an oasis in a canyon, and the streets echoed with the time of day, nearly dusk, a sound you can just hear, and actually someone was whistling a tune. I could hardly believe it. The Dutch word for two is twee, by the way. Jamie said, "This is like Sesame Street," as a kid was pushed on the swing by his mother, and maybe another one was trying to get the giraffe to spin.

It's a nice feeling, when you'd not been sure whether you were lost, to see the number of the flat, and your key fits so you know you're not on the wrong street or anything.

There are narrow winding stairs to climb up to Pieter's flat. There's a wide, low couch that should get an award for being comfortable. There are windows that let people see in, so be jaunty and quick when you're naked and need to go up and down the stairs.

The windows upstairs slant against the sky a bit more modestly. And there is the moon now; it's just an idea of itself so far, but it is almost a full circle.

Rake, Hockney, Quixote and Bacon.

2011-01-21T17:42:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, at Sir John Soane's Museum, in the small, tall picture room, I was imagining the young David Hockney standing in front of Hogarth's A RAKE'S PROGRESS, plotting out his own version. Perhaps he'd already made the first prints by the time he came here, not long after his return from New York – still a little shell-shocked and seeking sanctuary in this most British of institutions, the hush of Lincoln's Inn Fields leaving him a little nostalgic for the city he'd left behind. Or perhaps he came here when he first got to London, a hungry, exhilarated art student, slightly terrified at the ominous spectacle of Tom Rake's downward spiral.

On the same day, I also visited the Courtauld Gallery where Francis Bacon would have first confronted DON QUIXOTE AND SANCHO PANZA (Honoré Daumier, 1870)*, a few years earlier. The influence on him was clearly great – according to his dealer, Harry Fischer, he considered it to be “amongst the greatest paintings in the world”. The museum currently has Bacon's UNTITLED (CROUCHING FIGURES) hanging alongside it.

*Curiously enough, there exists an obscure theory that it was the Elizabethan Francis Bacon, not Miguel de Cervantes, who authored Don Quixote

In Marylebone

2011-01-16T11:08:00.000-08:00

For us, the first leg of any journey (we're going to The Netherlands next month) is a stop to Daunt Books to buy the appropriate Rough Guide to... Daunt Books is the prettiest bookstore in maybe the world. Just do Google Images for its name and you'll see what I mean. The whole afternoon wound up being lovely. After a brief, intense downpour, which we heard echoing through the atrium of John Lewis, the sky turned a vibrant blue and then a bright lavender. We were in Margaret Howell where all things feel relaxingly crisp and post-war. We came across Paul Rothe & Son, a deli I can't believe we didn't know existed. It was founded in 1900 or so, so it's not the original father and son, but it was a father and son running it; I know because the younger man said "dad" when they were gently arguing about something or other. The coffee machine or the electricals. They were both wearing white coats and yes everything else was preserved and there were rows of preserves. It was minimal and rustic and all those kinds of things we like in a place, and we happily ate sandwiches with our laspang souchong tea. (Mine: asparagus and sun-dried tomatoes; Jamie's: Olive tapenade.) I also loved the grey vinyl and stainless steel seat/tables. We walked down long tall streets as twilight illuminated a London we felt lucky to be in. "It's nice there are still places like that for us to discover," I said to Jamie on the tube escalator. "We're always finding new things," he said.

in ruins

2010-11-29T16:30:00.000-08:00

I'm glad we saw ROBINSON IN RUINS at the the BFI. What if we'd waited and somehow never got around to it. Perhaps we'd never have known what we'd missed but it would've been sad to have wound up watching those huge tiny lichen and industrious bees on our laptop. I'm glad Patrick Keiller is still using film. But of course Robinson continues to use film.

Robinson's world is something I introduced you to. You really went with me on that one, happy to continue your journey down through ever deeper strata of Englishness, getting the clay of this ancient island under your fingernails: you, me, Robinson and Albion. Back in art school, when I was here and you were over there, Robinson and the The Narrator's expeditions encouraged my ramblings through overgrown cemeteries, along disused train tracks and uninhabited canals. Then the towpaths were weedy and it was the final days of warehouses and factories: empty, sagging, crumbling into the water. Were there joggers then? Possibly. Media types with prams and promise, hipsters on bikes? Definitely not. If anything the solitude had me slightly on edge. In my mind the long shadows of approaching strangers measured out my final minutes. East London, home and passion, would have me floating face down in the Regents yet.

It changed a lot while I was gone. Robinson would have a lot to say about the miles of warehouse conversions and luxury flats no doubt. He would talk about Blair and capitalism and the great neoliberal project no doubt, thread the lines of the waterways into ever more complex systems. Didn't it make you feel small, last night? Following a year spent walking the periphery of an English university town became a vertigo inducing experience. The sheer vastness of the military presence in those green hills, all those chill-inducing acronyms: MOD, AWE, RAF, USAF, NATO, the enormity of power. Remember the spider? Maybe it went on for five minutes - just him spinning his web and Vanessa Redgrave's coolly delivered barrage of information chronicling a week or so in September 2008 during which the global financial system went Jenga. The spider was so beautiful, so efficient, so perfect. The phrase “tangled web” came to mind, but of course what we were witnessing was anything but and I suppose that was very much the point of the juxtaposition (the phrase “honest work” occurred to me as well and, having little grasp of the labours of hedge-fund managers, subprime mortgageteers and the like, it too resonated). Robinson the intellectual, the ex-con, the queer, the missing, and above all, the Biophile, has a lot more than facts to share with us.

The abandoned reels from which the film has been assembled (as the story goes), were shot, we're told, “in the manner of Turner”. Which makes a lot of sense when you recall that those unfamiliar lurid skies over J.M.W.'s England were probably more the result of the eruption of Mount Tambora on other side of the world than artistic license. Big global events outside of our control confront us in the hedgerows - just as in one shot a Cuckoo Pint plant towers over us and just as our epoch has us staring into the abyss. It made me think of that Friedrich painting, WANDERER ABOVE THE SEA OF FOG, the way that young Romantic is looking out over something both terrible and sublime.

Anyway, we should get out of the city and take a long walk soon. For Robinson.

a day without you with flowers

2010-10-31T11:09:00.000-07:00

I hope when you come home you don't think my flower arrangement is too weird. I'm sure you'll be supportive because you don't mind when things are odd, compositionally. There were lots of attractive couples on Columbia Road buying more traditional-looking combinations of flowers. But then they had each other to consult. Later I noticed two older men walking home with their flowers, one in a quilted waterproof and one in a peacoat. I thought of older us. I thought I was lost because I always get lost without you even though I'm in our own neighbourhood. But I was on the right street after all, and it took me to Leila's where I got a loaf of Portugese white bread and dark purple kale. I passed two women and they said, "he's got flowers" and reoriented themselves in the direction I came from... They were even more lost than I; tourists trying to find the flower market. It's a slightly funny thing for tourists to do, isn't it. Because they're not home. But then why not put flowers in your hotel room. I think mainly they want to hear the cockney accents of the barrow boys. My favourite call today was, "Flowers for your house, not a graveyard!" I used to dislike cut flowers, do you remember? I believe Tennessee Williams' tragic heroine thought they symbolised impending death, and Anna Madrigal muttered that line about beauty cut down before its prime. For me, I just felt bad for them, raised to be uprooted and transferred to a jar, selfishly. Jeff told me recently that at sub-audible levels, plants scream. So that doesn't make me feel any better. But the flower market draws me and I want to participate. And having flowers in the house reminds me that I live here and I live here with you.

freeze

2010-10-15T16:00:00.000-07:00

Last night, Jamie says, "Going to Frieze is like shopping at Ikea."

And so we've avoided that art week rush, but here and there in the peripheries we have felt its shadow.

Not far from home today: A secret snapshot taken upstairs at the White Cube gallery, and a phallic sign on the way back to the flat.

covers

2010-10-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

I found this first edition in San Francisco for 12 bucks. Maybe it kind of makes up for the fact that I saw a small Elizabeth Petyon monograph I used to own, which had been given to me for free, for sale at the Whitechapel Book Fair for $2500. But you know, things come and go.

It reminds me of Lou buying this CD based on the cover art, and how much I came to know the music. Lou used to walk around barefoot in Bernal Heights, and smoke cigarettes in the evenings on his rooftop. He moved to Portland, or Seattle, to learn to be a piano tuner. I wonder if that's what he's doing now. I'm hearing scales in my head.

P.S. We're back. Call it a summer holiday: I got a new job, and my sister got married in California. So, those are the excuses. Sorry for not writing. But we are a bit settled in, again, and autumn is here: The markets are bustling on the weekends, and our flat smells like cedar and sage, and you just may catch us on a lazy evening secreted in a corner in an out-of-the-way pub. Our calendar is back from the printer soon, and we're looking forward to smelling the ink. It's nice to see you again, with your jacket on, and big yellow leaves on the ground.

feet in the water

2010-07-11T00:47:00.000-07:00

The Jean Nouvel pavillion outside the Serpentine Gallery.

"The height of summer" even though the days are already shorter and it is hot in London and there is no air conditioning, which generally I approve of. We had these errands to do and we were sunburned from Devon and we were in town and we let ourselves get waylaid by: coffee, used bookstores, vegetarian burritos, and then Green Park and Hyde Park and the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition at the Serpentine.

Of course the music we've been listening to is surfing music, and I mean the old stuff a little bit, I can't stop listening to that drum solo from The Beach Boys, but also the new wave of, you know, summery dance music by bedroom musicians from the southern US. They call it chillwave and I'm really trying hard to be ok with that because I've never been opposed to genre coining, except that I just don't like that word chill. I feel like most people use it when they're not really "chill," even when they're angry, like telling somebody "chill out!" And then there's that other word that combines chill and relax which I honestly can't even bring myself to type. (Oh well, Summer. It's very often in bad taste, whatever.) Anyway, definitely Washed Out and some of those other bands like Small Black, I'm loving. The bands that came before like definitely Ariel Pink. And Jamie is going back to the summer music of a couple years ago, Brightblack Morning Light and Campfire Songs by Animal Collective. Everything covered in sand music. And stuff that's a bit sad in the middle of the most laid back weather. "Hey Now Who Really Cares?" by Linda Perhacs.

I'm never "in town" (that means the very most central part of London) in the middle of a hot Saturday. Obviously it's a bit stressful and there are lots of cute boys to look at everywhere. Shirtless or jumping on each other or sweaty or sagging and so on. My favourite one has freckles all over his face. More boys on the wall at Wolfgang Tillmans, not too many actually, mostly colours. It was pretty amazing to see it so crowded in there. I remember taking a train and a walk from San Francisco to Berkeley just to see his video piece of the disco ball, and the attendant at the gallery had to figure out how to turn the video on. We were it goes without saying the only people there and I guess they just hadn't bothered to turn the video on. Now we were in this crowded attraction, people who had come in to go to the toilet and stayed to escape the heat, and a pram jam ("we've been reading very challenging books," said the one mum to the other) and on the plus side kids being like that's my favourite! and their parents being like, oh, why is it your favourite? It's mine too, which is cool parenting I think. And there is that picture of the two Iraninan kids being hung publicly for being gay, and I would think that it would be something that I couldn't bring myself to look at it, but instead I can't take my eyes away. And these vitrines of mundane consumerist debris like a napkin from Eat or whatever, and I'm noticing that everyone is looking really hard and trying to get it, which is amazing because you know Wolfgang Tillmans stuff isn't maybe overtly impressive, it's not Gursky who shouts out wow, it's like Tillmans is whispering hmmmmm? or maybe just looking soundlessly. Which has always been why he is definitely one of my favourite artists, and one of those instances when you're like, is it possible for anyone else to be connecting with this like I do? But obviously enough do, and so that maybe is one sign of good art: That kind of selfishness interrupted, like you're thinking "this was made for me," and then you realize that there is something more, if not universal, broader you know, and other people are thinking the same thing. Jamie, of course, loves the astronomical aspect to the work, and he is a fan of how Tillmans, everybody always talks about how he goes really small, but Jamie is a fan of how he is willing in the middle of that to go kind of huge: Like planets and the whole politics of the whole world. He says, no subject matter is off limits. In one moment Eileen Myles called it "browser art," but she's not being dismissive, read the essay.

Summer on Bethnal Green High Street.

Outside of the exhibition, on the way to the station, we passed by the Peter Pan statue and right before the Spanish Fountains, sitting with their feet in the water were two boys and they were shirtless and bronzed and one was rubbing the other one's back. They were gorgeous like male models with lots of hair that stood up in waves, the hair of winners, and they were in a way the opposite of the Iranian boys. No, that's wrong. Not the opposite, but maybe the possibility. I mean we don't have to all look like we're in a photo by Bruce Weber but at least if we could be able to together put our feet in the water.

In Devon last week Jamie jumped into the sea twice despite the fact that both times we reached the ocean, clouds passed over and it got quite cool and barely anybody was swimming. But he is always willing to swim in the sea, almost always, and it makes his hair curly like a classical sculpture and his skin soft and smooth. Even he knows it. I should just wash my hair in salt water, he says. He says his nose is peeling off from sunburn but other than that he knows that all that nature made him a little extra beautiful. It's a good way to be in the middle of town, and this drunk guy in front of a casino says "Jesus!" to Jamie because of his beard, and not really sarcastically but kind of honestly star struck and pleased to see him. I'm motioning for him to ignore the guy and come along but I could have preached something Jamie says.

princely

2010-06-28T15:29:00.000-07:00

Did you notice the delightful Little Prince Google logo today?

walking and watching

2010-06-24T14:04:00.001-07:00

Part One: The Natural History Museum

The Wildlife Garden at the Natural History Museum is set up according to different native landscapes. Jamie and I began to come up with handsome boys' names based on the signage, like Fen and Oak and Heath. The security guard laughed at the way we had to take turns running through one gate in order to avoid the trajectory of a rotating sprinkler.

We were at the museum to take photos we need as source material for the 2011 calendar. We walked all across West London and into the museum carrying a very heavy Van Gogh tome that we scored for 12.99. The book is amazing so it was worth the heavy lifting.

The Natural History Museum is one of the coolest buildings in town. There are many little animal sculptures worked into the archways. We also got excited looking at the weird fish models. And Jamie made me go into the creepy crawly room with him. The "bugs in your house" model was unnerving.

On the tube on the way home, I came up with a new game: choose boys' names based on tube stops. Jamie found it incredibly frustrating and kept insisting he was resorting to "Tufnell."

Part Two: World Cup Fever

We watched England play Algeria at the Macbeth and it was a frustrating match, but fun anyway because I love drinking ale and watching the games. Three hot boys played pool next to our couch. Eventually our couch filled up with new friends and when the pub got crowded, we all sat up on the back of the couch to see better.

We went again on Sunday evening to see Brazil play the Ivory Coast. At first we were the only ones on the roof. "People are fatigued, I guess," I told the bartender and she said she knew she was. It meant we got to sit in front of the tv in the comfortable chairs, but we felt a little lonely. Jamie said it felt like we were at a resort on off-season. Fairy lights blinked on and off behind the screen. Soon enough we were joined by a group of French students. They were enthusiastically rooting for the Ivory Coast, and it was fun to watch the game with sounds like "oooh, oooh, oooh, parfait..." behind us.

On Wednesday, we watched the England game under a glaring sun with several beers, a few too many; the kind of drinking guided by meeting debit card minimums at the bar. Because England won, a sense of elation and drunken gaiety spilled throughout the streets of London, in and out of tube carriages and floating lightly along the Thames. London is feeling jolly with this warm weather this week; it smells of beer and b.o., and the boys can't help but turn their heads when the pretty girls walk by in short skirts. I was on the tube towards Waterloo with a bunch of drunk guys and one came over to his friends; he had been talking to a girl in the next seating section. "She said she works in the fashion industry," he said. "And I couldn't help myself, I had to ask her, I said, 'So tell me, the fashion industry: Is it sagging?'"

I'm still rooting for England.

verb videos, first set

2010-06-24T12:46:00.000-07:00

In an odd, spontaneous and exhibitionist little side project, we've made four Verb Videos, which we think relate to our mission as stationery designers as they distill feelings or moments into tiny capsules. These first four verbs are: Kiss, Slap, Dance and Whisper. Hope you like.

sunshowers

2010-06-13T14:30:00.000-07:00

This summer is becoming kind of like the summer before, and the summer before that: Unsure of itself. Often grey and sometimes wet, with spurts of real sun and heat, just to tease and remind you what summer is supposed to be. So what is the soundtrack? There are obvious cosy autumn records, obvious high summer records. This playlist is for the kind of day where you don't know whether to wear a raincoat or espadrilles, or both. It's a list of albums I think are appropriate for a reluctant summer.

Blue, Joni Mitchell.
Like an idyllic day with a passing cloud, Blue could be an easy road trip record conjuring warm North Africa and Southern California, but it interrupts the party with a dose of melancholy. "River" positively sounds like a Christmas song.

Adventure, Television.
The other day, a DJ on BBC 6 was talking about Television's second album, which has always been overshadowed by its masterful precedent, Marquee Moon. He played the song "Days," which felt like just the right tone for this theme. I got out my vinyl copy. It skips, which seems kind of appropriate. Underneath the surface scratches, Adventure is a soft and pensive album, and I'll be spending some time with it this reluctant summer.

#1 Record, Big Star.
Big Star sounds like a 1970s high school notebook — decorated with rock and roll stickers and stoner doodles, but with introspective notes on heartbreak and wonder inside.

The Virgin Suicides, soundtrack.
When you think of the film The Virgin Suicides, do you think of a particular season? I know that the story travels through autumn (back to school) and spring (prom), but my general impression is rather of a state of imbalance and transition.

Blow-Up, soundtrack.
Same thing for Blow-Up. The trees are green but everybody looks a bit chilled. Could it be a petering late summer? Blow-Up has got to be one of the great films about London, and it has this great sense of being made by an outsider. Perhaps Antonioni imposed a certain temperature — just a bit prickly, just a little sticky — as a reflection of the city's tepid climate.

A River Ain't Too Much To Love, Smog.
This is the album for after the BBQ unwinds and the night has cooled and you're inside in a cardigan with a greasy glass of red wine and the sliding glass door still just slightly ajar.

Album, Girls.
There's a song blatantly entitled "Summertime" here, but if you know San Francisco, where the band is from, you can hear in this record not the humid scorcher of a blues song from the deep south, but rather an indecisive ennui, as the evening fog rolls in every evening over the city by the bay.

On The Beach, Neil Young.
For its song "See the Sky About to Rain," of course, its weird cover of a slightly overcast beach, and Neil Young's ability, like Joni, to combine a West Coast vibe with the blues.

Parade, Prince.
For its beautiful song "Sometimes it Snows in April," of course, and for its general feeling of restlessness.

Teen Dream, Beach House.
There has always been an irony to the band's name considering their dark sound. A beach house, sure, but with the howl of a summer storm against the window panes.

oswald and the moths

2010-06-12T02:02:00.000-07:00

Oswald, Jamie's childhood teddy, sat on the middle shelf in the bedroom between books and small framed drawings and photos. We hadn't realised that Oswald had become moth-infested. It was really disturbing to see him covered in tiny black eggs, with a few larvae (or pupa, I don't know, gross though, like maggots,) and then a few adult moths flying about nearby. We did a big clean out, obviously. And Jamie put Oswald in the sink, along with his friend, this big teddy Jamie found in his grandparents' attic and nobody can remember where he came from. Oswald got washed and scrubbed and squeezed until he looked really upset and a little mad and was on the side of the sink drying in this position like he was holding himself and shivering. He had become all tiny and wet and we surveyed the damage: A lot of fur missing, especially around the limbs. The big teddy fared better, hadn't really become a moth nest like Oswald. The two of them are now drying out on an orange beach towel like two wrinkled old sunbathers. Get well soon.

neighbourhood

2010-06-11T00:23:00.000-07:00

Philina came to London, pretty and full of big words. We loosened up after the first tall ale and soon enough we were all over the place conversationally and all over East London geographically. At the flower market, Phil bought us a bouquet of Sweet Williams and we climbed the stairs to the book shop, where I got a copy of Prick Up Your Ears and the man who always has good bits of information told me that Joe Orton used to hang out at The Island Queen in Islington. We went up on the roof of the Red Lion and down the curb at Brick Lane and ate prawns with cumin at My Old Place Chinese restaurant. By nightfall (we asked each other, what is the difference between "dusk" and "twilight," and is it all simultaneously "evening"?), we were nearly asleep on the dead grass at Hoxton Square, like some teenagers on the campus lawn after dark.

Then Joe King came. He was a legend when I was thirteen, especially after he changed his name from Joey and got into a lot of trouble. I don't think I ever really said two words to Joe King back then, but he had a twinkle in his eye and I could tell he was sweet. Now that I've spent a weekend in London with him I've said a million words to him, and he told us lots of good stories too. His voice squeaks just a bit; something about him was built to be a 1950s teenager. A sweet bad boy in a denim jacket. Joe is a lovely lovely guy.

The East London train is running now and it makes me incredibly happy. It looks so fresh and new and its colours are yellow, orange and blue. It is exciting to see it go past, especially when you catch a glimpse of it across a bridge, then it darts out of view behind some buildings and then appears again. It makes me feel like I live in a train set.

I realised that one of the reasons I like Leila's Shop so much is there is no overhead lighting: So if it's a grey day the café and shop are a bit grey; if it's sunny, the rooms are bright. It seems organic. Also! I have discovered that in the shop, they sell Polish pickles, meaning the sour kind. I don't like sweet British gherkins and had never been able to find my kind of dill pickles over here. The boys who work there call them crocodiles because they float in vinegar water at the bottom of a big tureen.

petit cinema

2010-06-08T23:05:00.000-07:00

a song from last summer

2010-06-02T12:16:00.000-07:00

I'd forgotten about these earnest lads and their song from last summer.

my sister jenny in london

2010-05-27T14:01:00.000-07:00

Summer in London arrived just for my sister Jenny. In the evenings, people spilled onto pavements and curbs. The folks who run Joy Indian on Broadway told us they'd take a table onto the street for us, and we had our own little piece of the Mediterranean life. In the afternoon on the hottest day, people lounged in the shade in front of The Palm Tree pub off Regent's canal, and a man in a wheelchair DJed from an iPod in a silver briefcase: Was that Nuyorican soul jazz? Everyone applauded when a massive dog championed his struggle to board a barge.

The setting sun through drying laundry.

While she was here, the sun would set as a fiery red ball; from our window, it seemed to sink exactly through the arch of that new building. I took this photo shortly after she left, and was feeling melancholic.

Jenny agreed that the cha ca la vong at Viet Grill on Kingsland Road is one of the best dishes in the whole wide world. We ate at Leila's, My Old Place, Pizza East... We ate junk in Camden that made us feel fat and forced ourselves to walk it off all the way to Hampstead Heath. We hit the pubs at night and the parks in the day. We drank along the Thames; the bartender was so excited to make Jenny a mojito (after pouring Pimms all evening) that she sang, "I'm going to make a mojito! I'm going to make a mojito!" We arrived at a club just in time to catch the Ruby Suns, a summer band, and had a good dance. Jeff has roof access now and we got giddy up there. You see the neighbourhood differently, and realise there's a whole community of people up on their roofs.

On Saturday, London Fields was the massive party you'd expect. We were sad and a little scared when gunshots from a teenager, which randomly hit an innocent man in the stomach, put an end to the festivities. A helicopter had to land in order to airlift the poor guy to the hospital. I felt ashamed of London then. Most of the time besides that, I felt proud.

The goodbye drinks at Royal Oak.

Ever since she was a little girl, everyone has always told Jenny that she looks good with her hair pulled back. She wears a ponytail prettily and she has a confident smile and an elegant neck. She talks the talk and she laughs heartily. Miss you.

another

2010-05-02T01:51:00.000-07:00

Yet another discovery uncannily similar to our Autumn Sounds Like trope!

summer mix up

2010-04-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

We often wonder what songs are bestowed upon our card/discs designs, and here someone has gone and posted their track list, so we're grateful for that. "Zebra" by Beach House is on our summer mixes, too.

We've had a string of sunny days and just as many guests. Our Argentinian guest Diego, upon seeing our October 2009 calendar page, said he was reminded of this Argentinian song, which talks about leaves crunching like cereal.

leila's shop

2010-04-14T11:08:00.000-07:00

The boys who work at Leila's Shop look wholesome and dress in fabrics that look soft, and the cute girl has got earrings like two big cherries.

At the cafe, we ate eggs and sage, delicious. We enjoy all of the details: Whitewashed walls and chalkboards and the multi-story drying rack and old-fashioned pans and butter dishes.

Next door at the shop, we were greeted by all kinds of good green sights, and when you open one lid, the most beautiful smell wafts up from dried limes. "That's a good lid to open," agreed the sweet boy in the oversized jumper. He brought us a purple sprouting broccoli and we felt special because it wasn't on display yet, he got it specially for us, so we bought it (along with some lettuce and an onion), and it's what we will eat tonight. Leila's makes me feel like I am in the past and I can't believe the sweet boy called "cheerio" to us as we left.

To home again, and we passed through a bed of flowers at a memorial in the yard of Shoreditch Church.

Later that afternoon, dropping off some stuff, the smiling girls at Tatty Devine directed us to go meet Leigh in the studio behind the shop. The route there introduced us to yet two more London streets. I'm sorry I didn't take a photo, but am just leaving you with that idea: Of how it always seems in London that there are new streets to discover.

sunday

2010-04-11T15:05:00.000-07:00

On Brick Lane, indulging our free breakfast prize at the Swedish restaurant Fika, Jamie said, "I love candles in the daytime." So I took this portrait with my mobile phone.

I had been reading from Derek Jarman on David Hockney, "...he was the spirit of the age. His presence in a room blew away cobwebs. In thanks, a whole generation called at Powis Terrace with flowers — tulips, if possible, for our man of all seasons."

It is Sunday, the day of Columbia Road Flower Market, so I bought tulips.

We stopped into the second floor second hand bookshop, and we buy paperbacks... Frank O'Hara and Genet for me. I'm going through a phase of reading loads of queer literature.

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they've always talked about
will make a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They're strong as rocks.
— Today by Frank O'Hara

We took our books and tulips to the Nelson's Head and sat by the fake fireplace. Outside, hayfever-inducing blossoms sailed on the blustery air. "You look a scene," said Jonjo, kneeling at our table piled with books. "Like we were to have our portrait taken," I said. "If only you had a camera," said Jonjo, pointing at the embarrassingly picturesque Pentax K-1000 sitting on our table to complete the image.

canal west

2010-04-10T00:38:00.001-07:00

Usually on the canal we head East. You know, to London Fields or Victoria Park. Once recently we kept going all the way to the Thames. We picked up some old pieces of clay from the bank and had a pint at Prospect of Whitby.

A walk on the canal is fully justifiable "work time" to us these days as we're developing a collaborative design project on the theme.

This past Wednesday was a mess; it was grey and drizzly. It made our bones cold and our nerves stressed. So when Thursday showed itself to be something different, a day filled with sun (something you can sense first thing in the morning as you hear the particular sound of car tyres on the road), we knew we had to get out of the house.

It was time to head west. We got onto the canal near City Road. At the basin, a couple of boys pretended to copulate against a rail. We had to leave the canal right away at Islington, under which the canal swims through a long tunnel without a tow path. We slipped through the crowds at the high street shops and at Chapel Market, anxious to get back to the water.

We walked against the backdrop of King's Cross and St. Pancras, through the area known, in the movie anyway, as Somers Town. This, by the way, is a good little film. Along with Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky, it seems able to capture something real about recent life in London. In Somers Town, two boys live modestly and restlessly in the shadow of the stations; knowing that high speed trains are regularly departing to Paris casts a spell of hope and glamour over their landscape of council estates.

The next phase of the canal is being prepared for massive waterfront renovations. Digital renderings show us a near future of dusky lounging amongst fountains and broad steps, cinemas and restaurants of a rather suburban bent. In one depiction of a future shopping plaza, women are out about alone and in pairs, walking past fictive storefronts with names like "Tangerine" (juice bar) and "Pashma" (women's clothing). We could tell that this particular collage artist, by his choice of clip art photo models, has a preference for women of full bosom. We glanced across at a big, proud barge, weathered but not beaten, colourful. Will such crafts be an awkward fit at the bank of the new architecture? Like an indie kid in Converse and a Dinosaur Jr. t-shirt sitting in a fancy bar to the sound of "downbeat electronica."

Jamie recalled one of the first of the new generation of loft-like canal residence developments, and indeed we came to it soon after. It has its charm; I'm not offended by that type of '90s architecture that attempts to replicate the portable aspects of crates and caravans. I'm not even offended by a little postmodernism along the water, if its theme is nautical. Let's face it, I'm pretty open to the ways one might live near the water.

Like road signs indicating the approach to Camden, couples along the canal began to show bits of that gothy market aesthetic: Dyed black hair, facial piercings, thin eyebrows, clumpy shoes and velvet jackets. The same look for many years now. By the time we arrive in the market area, the canal was absolutely flooded with teenagers. One girl, riding on a barge with a couple of friends, had a bow in her hair fixed with a lacy antique veil over her face. A good looking boy appeared to have excited himself by the motion of turning the crank on the lock; when he turned towards us, his visceral reaction was showing in his trousers. We stopped into town a bit, smelled the food cooked in stalls. "Festival food," said Jamie. And all of a sudden these kids didn't seem that different from when we were kids; they are sloppy and rebellious and randy. "It's refreshing how Camden never seems to change," said Jamie. Market stalls sell useless trinkets and Indian blankets and the smell of incense fills the air.

The most incredible part of the canal, especially if you aren't expecting it, is the part that takes you through the London Zoo. The canal weaves right through the cages, so at one point we stood between the aviary and a bankside run which housed a family of hyenas. In the aviary, a peacock stood in full feather. He slowly rotated, making sure to turn back towards us when he heard the camera mechanism on my mobile phone. "What a peacock," said Jamie. From the vantage point of the zoo visitors, we must have looked like a part of the exhibition: Humans. Jamie made a joke that the canal was filled with crocodiles and we had been trapped into serving as feed.

Primrose Hill. It reminds me of Brit Pop era. It is a Blur song. Jamie took me here when we were younger. He was styled in sunglasses and a blazer and the lot. "You look like a pop star!" said his sister Lucy, and she was being sarcastic and admiring at the same time. Today, the kids look like the cast from Skins, in particular at the adorable lesbian picnic to our right, in which the cuddly girlfriends really did look uncannily like Emily and Naomi. One's hair was dyed red, the other's bleached blonde. They seem to have several tote bags each, printed with drawings of bicycle tires or forest animals or other such things. They displayed their affection sweetly in that way reserved for two young girls in the grass.

Up off the canal in stately St. John's Wood, Jamie reminisced about the days he crashed at an older man's house. "God, I really took the piss," said Jamie with hindsight. He stayed there for several weeks while saving money to come see me in San Francisco. We scanned the A-Z and tried to remember the street name, but couldn't work it out. So we walked a bit past houses it would seem we'll never be able to afford, and went underground at Warwick Avenue, the station in the song by Duffy. We changed trains at Baker Street, perhaps the most beautiful tube station in London, with its Sherlock Holmes wall tiles and signage directing travelers to many different points in Londontown.

We disembarked at the Barbican and emerged into its tall concrete structures, made soft with water stains and plants and flowers. The sun was still out. People were talking about the evening papers, about the election and David Cameron. It was a day not just for remembering, but to remember. This is where we are now, in London again. Some things have changed, other aspects remain much the same. The look of those rebellious teens in Camden, for instance, and the presence of mad dogs and Englishmen in the noonday sun.

what keeps us from setting sail

2010-03-24T15:23:00.000-07:00

Never has Shoreditch felt like the unfortunate nexus of The City and East London more than tonight.

In a basement at a scrubbed-up, buttoned-down bar called The Luxe, a soulless techno thump was dimmed and we watched Alexis Joshua of Orphans & Vandals perform. Everything was as it should be, almost: He was in front of a brick wall, the room was lit by candles. You could think: Dylan in the Village! Unfortunately, a couple of overweight City Boys who didn't realize what was about to happen kept in their seats and kept talking (About Chat Roulette! Seriously!) throughout the first half of the set. Despite, the music was riveting. Joshua's lyrics, sung in a gruff, sometimes broken voice, are enough to make you cry. I was reminded of the time I found myself in the kitchen, alone and at a very tender time, listening to an Orphans & Vandals song played by Tom Robinson on the radio, and I was frozen. I think my foot was on the pedal of the rubbish bin and it just stood agape, like me.

The City Boys didn't ruin it for me. I was heartily moved, especially after they left. Lyrics about matchsticks and ships and first kisses and make-up kisses and Argos Square and a flat above a bookshop on Church Street made me feel transported. I was reminded of Eileen Myles and even of Jean Genet. But during the first couple songs, I was distracted by the City Boys and couldn't help thinking this: How resistant they are to hearing music. I wonder what gene it is in them, or what inclination anyway, keeps them from opening their hearts to music. Maybe it is the peer pressure of each other's company. Maybe if they let go a little, they'd simply fall to bits. Get drunk, skip work the next morning, quit their jobs, and board a ship to see the world, fuck sailors and tattoo themselves once they've crossed the equator. Instead they collected their bags, the kind that have lots of work papers in them, and left quietly, and Alexis Joshua kept singing. Outside, it was pouring with rain.

live album

2010-03-24T03:07:00.000-07:00

The Observer gave away a free download of Phoenix Live in Sydney on Sunday (sorry, you can no longer access it), and so me and Jamie got a new favourite live album in our lives.

It is EXCELLENT for cleaning up and doing chores. It's a straightforward, highly energized 8-song live recording of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, with a noodly "Love Like a Sunset" at its centre, taking it down to a spare sense of atmosphere but never completely loosening up, and happily chugging back into a power pop song, hence encouraging renewed vigor as you scrub the walls or dry the dishes or whatever.

This made me think of some of my other favourite live albums. Here they are:

Wire, Wire on the Box 1979.
Bola Sete, Bola Sete at the Monterey Jazz Festival.
These are the albums I know least intimately on this list, but I love the sound of both. The Wire recording is a part of a DVD package. It conveys a raw, angular and dark feeling that sometimes to me just feels like the best thing in the world. It's good to turn to when Joy Division has become too familiar and is starting to feel like pop. I listen to it on my headphones or put it on at my part-time job at a clothes shop. Though sometimes I feel kind of guilty and take it off, because as background music it can be a bit of a downer. Bola Sete, on the other hand, produces a warm sound. And as only Brazilians can, he goes from elegantly pastoral to hyperactive freakout without you even noticing. At one point, he does these improvs that sound like beatboxing. The liner notes say, "Dig the weird, organic, humanized sounds he produces. Unbelievable!" Indeed, it is a beautiful and strange record.

The Modern Lovers, Live at the Longbranch & More
There's something bratty about Jonathan Richman as he reminds his Berkeley audience that he's strictly East Coast. But when a lead man is feeling cocky, it makes for ramshackle rock and roll, which somehow suits even a performer as verbose as Richman. Some of the songs, like the classic 'A Plea For Tenderness' were recorded closer to home, at the Boathouse in Cambridge.

Townes Van Zandt, Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas.
"The restrooms are upstairs. Payphone's upstairs. Pool table's upstairs. Foosball's upstairs. Cigarette machine's upstairs. This week, the Old Quarter's had Townes Van Zandt for five nights. We have him for one more night. And we're glad to have him here tonight: Townes Van Zandt." So begins an epic set of 23 songs, starting with his classic "Pancho & Lefty." His haunting ballads are stripped raw of their recorded orchestration, and a handful of goofier moments like the cheeky "Fraternity Blues" and a joke about a key and a crotch keep the show balanced and sexy. Makes me want BBQ.

Mississippi John Hurt, Live!
Recorded in 1965 at Oberlin College at the point of his rediscovery, this is poorly recorded and thus not generally believed to be a great concert album. It is, however, the one that I have and love. And I don't mind all that vinyl crackling and far-away sound; in fact, I like it a lot.

Nina Simone, The Great Show of Nina Simone Live in Paris.
Another live record where I know by heart all the hums and stutters, both in French and English. Sadly, my wonky turntable was skipping a bit before dinner one evening, and I got overexcited in handling the needle and put a scrape across the record. I haven't listened to it since out of fear that I really dug out the vinyl. I'll pull it out again one breezy evening and hope for the best.

Sonic Youth, Sonic Death: Early Sonic 1981-1983.
Comprised of two long tracks (one clocking in at 38 minutes, the other at 29 minutes), this is basically a bunch of noise. I used to put this CD on every night before going to sleep, I loved it so much. At certain points you get the drift that wherever they're playing, they are like two people in the audience. At one point, heckler yells, "Get off the stage!" To which Thurston Moore says, "suck my dick" or something like that. It's a pretty funny moment of relief in the middle of all the rather pretentious amplified washes of sound.

Ike & Tina, Live at Carnegie Hall: What You Hear is What You Get.
This is Jamie's favourite. I bought it for him as a gift one time because of the awesome cover with the rainbow on it. Tina's raunchiness and passion never fails to impress. She's so garage. She says she wants to talk about "soul music with grease." One of the fun things about this record is that it begins with the Ikettes, and you have this whole feeling of anticipation building before Tina finally takes to the microphone. I asked Jamie why this was one of his favourite live albums. He came out of the kitchen and said, "This is what I think. It's like a high wire trapeze act. Because it's this balance of consummate professional showmanship and the fact that it's all about to explode into this animalistic frenzy."

Nirvana, MTV Unplugged in New York.
I'll be honest with you. I'm not somebody whose life was changed by Nevermind, not directly anyway. And it wasn't until years later that I heard this album, and I was kind of surprised at how well it sat with me and felt in tune with the music I was particularly into at the moment (The Microphones, The Mountain Goats). Acoustically, Nirvana take on this almost folky sound to me. Looking back at Nirvana's studio albums, for all of the supposed "grunge," I find they actually sound a little overproduced. This live record showcases the band's songwriting, and Kurt's ragged voice sounds painful and poetic. It is an intimate and tender recording. The audience knows they're witnessing something special. You can feel magic in the air.

Portishead, Roseland NYC Live.
The other day we were at Climpson & Sons having a cinnamon toast (me) and haloumi sandwich (Jamie) and Portishead was playing. Jamie was like, "It is amazing how Portishead managed to make something so strange and dark, and yet totally acceptable coffee shop music." It's true that Dummy has been ubiquitous in coffee houses from day one, and still is today. What this live album seems to do, besides fill out the sound even more with full orchestra and rough it up with even more turntable scratching, is heighten the element of danger. If you've ever seen Portishead perform live, you know that singer Beth Gibbons crouches furtively, hidden behind her hair and a cloud of cigarette smoke. What would be just painful with another performer is somehow intoxicating with her.

Animal Collective, Campfire Songs.
Recorded on a porch in rural Maryland using acoustic guitars and three mini-disc recorders, Campfire Songs is at first listen a lot of repetition and drone. Their transitions begin to betray an incredible musicianship; I've always marveled at how Animal Collective can connect the way they do live. It reminds me of those heavyweights of jazz improv. Out of the final song, De Soto De Son, emerges one of the most poignantly pretty melodies I've ever heard.

Jeff Mangum, Live at Jittery Joe's.
There's a fun bit with a gurgling baby who seems to give a little scream of appreciation. The kid is not alone; Magnum's audience is reverent and energized. The vibes work both ways, and he absolutely plays his heart out. One wouldn't necessarily have guessed that his songs would survive without all of the crazed marching band orchestrations of the albums he recorded under the Neutral Milk Hotel moniker, but solo he actually is able to harness the oomph of all his missing musicians into this tight little fire ball of musical love. The disc (limited edition at the time of release) comes with a video of the performance. For a long time, I didn't want to watch it so as not to disrupt my feeling of the show. Funnily enough, having watched it, I can't recall the visual of it much, but rather carry with me the imagined image I always had in my mind.

P.S. A little miracle of a cover of Phoenix's "Lisztomania."

bristol state of mind

2010-03-20T02:44:00.000-07:00

As you know, we have been obsessively watching Skins. Last weekend we found ourselves with Nina and Matt in beautiful Bristol, where the series is filmed; it was hard not to compare everything and everyone to the show ("There's a Cassie!" "There's a Tony-and-Michelle!").

We were lucky in sunshine in the West Country, and we breathed in the sea air at Boscastle with gratitude. When is it we last saw the sea? There were ships on the horizon in Falmouth, and on the beach, huddled groups of students, not quite shirtless yet, but with their jeans rolled up. We each picked our tribe — which group of friends we'd fit in with. Jamie's friends were wearing Baja hoodies. My friends were a group of girls reading books, smoking cigs and eating Haribo. Lucy's friends were a couple of girls with gypsy scarves who stared romantically at the sea. None of us felt cool enough for the two art boys in coloured Ray Bans, and we shunned the large group of white kids with dreads. Yuck.

It was a tease of sunshine, that week, a sneak preview: We all began to itch for summer, and camping.

Coming home to London, Jamie and I both fell prey to a sore throat. Couchridden, what else but to watch more Skins? And, at risk of turning this into a Skins blog, I have to report the awesomeness of the episode we watched last night. Centered on the character of Naomi (whose last name is, hilariously, Campbell), it is is the "lesbian love" episode, and being inside it really feels like being inside the wonder of a first crush. Naomi and Emily even swam in a lake. The cut-off-shorts-happy-feeling was abetted by a solid soundtrack of wide-eyed indie pop. The songs were as follows:

Diamond Day. Vashti Bunyan.
Hard Rock. Audio Networks.
Love Action. The Human League.
Good Weekend. Art Brut.
Oakland Lake Legz. Experimental Dental School.
I'm Happy But You Don't Like Me. Asobi Seksu.
Art. Diskettes.
White Film. Tujiko Noriko.
Jump In. High Places.
Believer. Susanna and the Magical Orchestra.
After The Call. Electrelane.
Instant Karma. John Lennon.
Walking. Dodos.
Mr You're on Fire Mr. Liars.
Just As You Are. Robert Wyatt.
Heavy Water/I'd Rather Be Sleeping. Grouper.
Tainted Love. Gloria Jones.

(source)

Taking a few of the surreal twists the show is good for, the episode ends in a full-on student riot and hand holding via cat flap. I felt like I was in 1986, or inside a Moldy Peaches song. Rad feelings.

I woke up this morning and all of that love (plus the medication and two days of sleep) has paid off: My cold seems to be on the mend. Hungover from the last night's hazy episode, I checked my inbox to find this picture of summertime boys in my Google Reader.

Apparently, as these things do, it's been reposted dozens of times already: The abandoned shoes, the wet trunks, the beer. We're all so, so ready for summer.

Bonus Material: "Bristol," by Herman Düne.

jamie always says the best things

2010-03-05T11:28:00.001-08:00

Last week we were at The George and Dragon. We had been to Pizza East and were quite full and a bit sloshy. The guys from Horse Meat Disco were spinning records and the vibe was festive. This one guy got up and began dancing insanely. He was wearing a jacket with tails and he could kick and bend his legs crazily and bend backwards to the floor and back up again. He looked like that character from Nightmare Before Christmas. A couple of his girl friends joined him and they were pretty impressive, too. One was wearing a pair of strappy patent shoes with high high stiletto heels. Watching them, I said to Jamie, "If you were a girl, could you wear shoes that high?" Jamie just shook his head and simply said, "If I was a girl, I'd dress like Chrissie Hynde."

emily's heart

2010-03-04T02:49:00.000-08:00

Save BBC 6 Music

2010-03-02T14:25:00.000-08:00

Re-post on your blog, flickr, tumblr et cetera!

with the radio on

2010-02-28T03:52:00.000-08:00

"Wow," said Anh. "The radio here is good."

You know Anh. She's one of my most musically educated friends. (She made this mix recently, which is the perfect compliment/antidote to late winter blues.) Anh was in our flat sipping tea (rooibus with milk). We, of course, had the Roberts radio tuned to BBC 6 Music, and it was playing something good. I felt proud of her approval. But it also felt like an inevitable part of British culture: Good quality pop and indie rock on the radio.

But now it seems feels like the opposite of inevitable. The state of BBC 6 Music is precarious. The BBC is currently facing pressure to make cuts from both the Conservative party and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation newspapers. The BBC is caving; 6 Music and the Asian Network stations look set to close, and funding will be cut in foreign imports (largely American HBO programming) and the BBC's online presence.

While all of these cuts make me feel deeply nervous, it is 6 Music which I happen to hold close to my heart. DJ Richard Bacon remarked to The Guardian yesterday, "Far from being an example of what's wrong with the Beeb, 6 Music is a beautiful example of the BBC at its best."

Guardian writer Alexis Petridis argues that, besides the awful, noisome DJ George Lamb, "there is a sense that losing 6 Music would create a hole in British broadcasting. It does things that no other national radio station does, not least employ knowledgeable, enthusiastic, music-first presenters... In an age when a lazy, ironic detachment is broadcasting's default setting... it's actually rather startling to hear."

It was on 6 Music that our story was recently read by Jarvis Cocker on his literate, atmospheric program Sunday Service. Queer punk pioneer Tom Robinson hosts a show admirably and rigorously devoted to discovering new music. Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone is one of the most experimental programs on mainstream radio. Hosts like Adam & Joe and Jon Robinson reinvigorated an educated, creative approach to on-air humour. I have a soft spot for Dave Pearce's Dance Anthems on Sunday evenings: For some reason it is really comforting to hear '90s techno and house as you cook dinner and drink wine with absolutely no intention of going out clubbing. (BBC 6 Music's target demographic is said to be 30-50 year old music lovers.)

Since I moved to London, 6 Music introduced me to pretty much all of my favourite contemporary bands. This is a station that put Girls' "Hellhole Ratrace" on heavy rotation, an honour I doubt the band felt in their native San Francisco. Recent live sessions include bands like The Drums and Wild Beasts. Stuart Maconie invited These New Puritans' Jack Barnet to discuss some of the songs that influence his band: He played Benjamin Britten next to Britney Spears.

The sound of the radio permeates our flat and workspace much of the day. Perhaps there aren't enough of us. (Although recent figures suggest 6 Music's listenership is actually growing.) Perhaps 6 Music's "seriousness" is perceived as stoicism. And stoics make for good martyrs. On the contrary, I don't find the station pretentious. I find it a lot of fun. It makes me feel connected to current British music as well as to it's incomparable history. (This is a station that regularly plays bands like The Kinks, The Fall, The Wedding Present and The Slits, for instance.) In an era when the integrity of the BBC is regularly called into question regarding transparency, funds allocation and extremely bloated salaries, it is sadly ironic that the place to cut would be a station which established itself on the premise of broadcasting integrity. How depressingly typical.

If and when the day comes when the signal to this station dies, I will very likely be on the verge of a good cry. 6 Music helped indoctrinate me into my new life in the UK.

You can join the Save BBC 6 Music Facebook group here. This page will also direct you to contact the BBC.

Images from BBC 6 Live sessions from top: Duffy, Cat Power, Camera Obscura, Devendra Banhart and Spiritualized.

winter recipe

2010-02-23T10:30:00.000-08:00

This recipe, from the majestic book Tender by Nigel Slater, made us so happy last night. I couldn't resist reprinting it for you. Jamie added a bit of nutmeg. All rights, I'm sure, belong to Nigel and his publisher. Sorry.

A filling, carb-rich supper for a winter's evening

Early February, icy-cold day. I find great spinach in the shops but little to go with it. I grab a bag of those factory-made vacuum-packed gnocchi that always make me feel as if I have just eaten a duvet. With cream, blue cheese and spinach, they have a rib-sticking quality that would keep our Arctic cold, let alone a bit of urban chill. I just need food like this.

enough for 2
vacuum-packed gnocchi - 500g
spinach leaves - 200g
creamy Gorgonzola - 250g
double cream - 200 ml
a little Parmesan or pecorino

Set the oven at 200˚/Gas 6. Bring a deep pan of water to the boil and salt it generously. Drop the gnocchi into the water and leave until they float to the surface — a matter of a few minutes. Drain and set aside.

Meanwhile, wash the spinach and remove the stalks. With the leaves still dripping wet, put them into a thick-based pan set over a moderate heat and cover with a lid. The leaves will cook in their own steam in a matter of seconds. They are ready when they are completely wilted and bright emerald green. Remove them from the pan and let them cool briefly before wringing them dry. Now tear them up a little and put them, in lumps if that is how they are, into a gratin dish or shallow baking dish. It should be large enough for the gnocchi to fit snugly in one layer. Cut the Gorgonzola into pieces and tuck in amongst the spinach, then scatter over the gnocchi.

Season with salt and black pepper, pour the cream over the lot — it won't quite cover everything, just sort of lap at the edges — then grate over a little Parmesan or pecorino, just enough so that you can see it. Bake until golden and bubbling — about thirty to thirty-five minutes. Serve piping hot.

in defense of a tv show

2010-02-18T13:12:00.000-08:00

skins

When we first moved back to the UK, a new television show called Skins was just airing. The commercials for it were annoying: A group of teenagers at an implausibly decadent house party took their shirts off, did funny dances wearing sunglasses indoors, writhed around and vomited. With lighting somewhere between a Mike Leigh film and a Diesel ad, the commercials looked like they could have been for a perfume sold at Boots and smelling of locker room.

Despite this, when I happened upon the first series in the Shoreditch library, having recently read a positive mention in The Guardian, I decided to give it a go.

Soon enough there were little indicators that the show is actually really good. In one such instance, Cassie announces (deceitfully) that her anorexia has been cured and she won't be needing to visit her expensive clinic any longer. With genuine enthusiasm, her stepdad first congratulates her mother (whom he is presently painting nude) rather than Cassie. In this moment, Cassie's surface optimism takes another beating, and her deeper sense of hopelessness is quietly affirmed.

One signal of the directors' sensitivity is the attention to accents: There are varying degrees of broad West Country (the show is set in Bristol) as well as posh, affected posh and a coded Afro-Bristol DJ slang that requires subtitles. Sid's accent suddenly becomes Scottish when he's arguing with his dad, played by Peter Capaldi. The cast of Skins, like real British people, announce their background and current status in cadences. The show's actors are capable. They are subtle and full of range. And it's writers (who have included Simon Amstell) willfully avoid cliché. They even take some quite bizarre risks: An unexpected field trip to Russia. Visions that are difficult to discern from reality. Chris finds out that his mother has abandoned him whilst high on Viagra. The hottest boy in school can't get the gay boy, rather than vice versa. At the opening of one episode, Jal — the braces-wearing daughter of a successful musician (presumably based on Tricky) — gives a startlingly pure clarinet solo introducing Gershwin's familiar "Rhapsody in Blue." We feel a swell of triumph. Then the rest of the school orchestra kicks in, and the sound dissolves into a desperate mush. The meek-looking music teacher tries ruefully to get the band into gear; she resorts to a barrage of expletives.

We are subject to this kind of little shock at the start of each show. (Chris' family crisis episode begins with an unmissable boner in his Topman undies.) And then each episode ends abruptly with an inhale that never exhales (literally in the case of Jal and her clarinet, at a national musician championship). They are the kind of big life inhales that muster all of our strength. And just at the moment we're really rooting for the character at hand, the writers refuse to wrap anything up as neatly as we have come to expect (and perhaps desire) from typical teenage television.

Grown ups on the show are nicely well-rounded, foibled and sometimes lovely. They are consistently, however, the enemy. "They all have weird hair," Jamie pointed out. "Like when you are a kid and all adults appear to have weird hair." Generally, they are greedy, selfish and perhaps clinging onto their own youths. As for the youths themselves, they are a mess. I mean mucky, wearing old t-shirts with smelly pits, with greasy fingertips from eating crisps on the bus in the morning (one of several factors contributing to Cassie's anorexia). This is how I remember high school. It is the kind of grimy reality that many overlook: Not just stuff like squeaky clean 90210, but in films like the willfully designed Thumbsucker, by a graphic designer I admire, Mike Mills, who wrongly depicted high school restroom floors as shiny and clean. In truth, the floors are gross and sticky. Teenage life feels grotty.

And as for those annoying ads: Yes, they were obviously put out there to court controversy, to make a convenient enemy of the Daily Mail before a single episode aired, and to get horny viewers to tune in. But in another way, the adverts are part of an ongoing narrative innovation that the writers play with cloyingly. On the DVD of series one, there is not a selection of "deleted scenes," but rather a menu of "ancillary stories." Jamie and I watched them all: They turned out to be "back stories" relevant to plot advancement, often quirkier in tone than the actual show. (There's a whole series of surreal career counseling sessions with the awesome comedian Josie Long). In this vein, the adverts become relevant to story: A couple episodes in, we awaken to the sloppy aftermath of a gruesome party. One can easily imagine that it was the party shown in the ads. There is no need to show that night in the actual program; the series itself is very much about the anticipation before and consequences after such an event.

Besides just hyping the show as risqué, the ads also establish an honest fact: This is a show about bad kids. Sweet, funny, likable, confused and vulnerable kids, sure. And ones that live out their dramas with a lot more levity and goofiness than those ads might suggest. But they are indeed kids who smoke weed, pop pills, have sex, manipulate their friends and piss off their parents. So in one way, those ads are a hurdle for the likes of you and me, who don't necessarily want to hang with a bunch of obnoxious ravers. But they also effectively serve as a warning against casting judgment: These kids, after all, can't be bothered with those who judge. That would make you, like, their parents.

Skins Part Two.

Speaking of skins, here's the cover of the new 12" album from Swanton Bombs, Mumbo Jumbo and Murder. It's really fun stuff if you like rock. I cleaned the house to it on repeat. The reviewers at Rough Trade say, "If, light years from now, people ever want a snapshot of youth and young manhood in 2010, they could look no further than Swanton Bombs... To listen to their music is to experience vicariously the reckless thrills and irrepressible energy of a new generation, distilled to its rawest, untainted, unvarnished essence."

lived for the post

2010-02-16T03:20:00.000-08:00

(...a valentine's postscript.)

For three years, we lived for the post. These were the long distance years. There were moments we were able to be together: A month here and there in California, the good part of one late winter in London. Twice we met "mid-way," in New York. Looking back at this era, our times together appear robust and adventurous; our times apart seem hollow and stretched thin. It was the packages that sustained these interim periods. Rapturous, rambling, scheming letters and drawings woven from the grotty passion still lingering from adolescence. Illustrations whimsical and horny. I've written before about how we no longer have the mix tapes we made each other; we were crazy to get rid of them in the big move to England. But I feel grateful for those moments that each of us spent on the buses and trains in our respective cities, reading letters at the same time we listened to the mixes. His written from the hotel desk where he worked the night shift, and later from that battered old house with it's stray cat, Weetzie, and strange landlord, The Reverend. Mine penned on MUNI buses and in creaky Victorian flats. I slept with a snapshot of Jamie next to my bed; it's from when his hair was dyed bright red, with a curl on his forehead. Everybody said he was cute, even the straight boys. I am so happy that I wake up next to the actual him now. We really had to work for it. Those goodbyes were too unbearable.

I remember once when we were meeting "mid-way" in that dilapidated old Hotel 17 in New York City. I arrived a couple hours later than him. He had fallen asleep. I walked down the spookily dark, wallpapered corridor. Suddenly, his head poked round the corner of our room; a big giddy grin on his face. That's my image of Jamie, that's my image of us: Elated to be see each other, even now, if with less madness, at the end of the day. The kind of swirling hug you get in a terrible romance movie, only stood against the dank setting of a dirty hotel.

These thoughts have been with me a lot; hearing Jarvis read the story of our meeting on the BBC made me feel the weight of how our story guides our work as stationery designers. We are thinking of an image of the night shift at a hotel desk for the 2011 calendar. There are so many unanswered letters in the images we create for our calendars and cards. Some, perhaps, should be answered now; most I'm sure will be left open-ended.

It's Jamie's birthday today. I'm so glad he was born. It's Chinese New Year too, and my year, Tiger. So even though we don't follow astrology, we can't help but hope for a little bit of good fortune. I'm wearing red underwear.

on the radio

2010-02-15T01:15:00.000-08:00

A most magical Valentine's gift...

Jarvis Cocker reading the story of our meeting on his BBC Six show.

I recommend the whole two hour program, it's beautiful, but you can go right to our bit at about 1:22.

xx

pickpocket

2010-02-10T11:22:00.000-08:00

Images from another film about thieving, Pickpocket by Robert Bresson.

that sinking feeling

2010-02-10T07:20:00.000-08:00

I bet every time somebody reviews That Sinking Feeling, they start with the sentence, "Gregory's Girl is one of my all-time favourite movies," and then go on to say that they never realised that director Bill Forsyth made this film just a year prior. But that is how it was for us, too.

We came across the DVD in the library. Teenagers! In Glasgow! Heist! Directed by Bill Forsyth! I couldn't believe my luck. It's like if I made up an imaginary movie in my head (as I did two entries ago), this would be it. The film starts off with the precise tone as Gregory's Girl, painting a melancholic landscape of drizzly Glasgow, and features one of the same actors, the shrimpy one with feathered hair. The comedy takes some quietly absurd turns (like when a greedy adolescent bums a cigarette off an 8-year-old girl playing ball against a council estate).

So this is Glasgow, at the same moment of the formation of Postcard Records, and one wonders if a bit of indie wasn't in the air, if not yet abbreviated like that. In the plot, eight listless teenagers decide to steal 90 stainless steel sinks. The movie goes a bit sleepy during the actual heist, filmed with cheap equipment in dark locations without much finesse to the chain of events. It's no Rififi. It's not even The Great Muppet Caper. Jamie fell asleep during the heist. Which is a shame because he missed the return to absurd comedy that closes the film: Namely, the dilemma of what to do with 90 hastily stolen stainless steel sinks, and a weird twist that involves one of the kids' scientific discovery of how to freeze a human for several decades.

winter blues (via mobile)

2010-02-07T10:40:00.000-08:00

Bookshop window, Charing Cross Road.

Debit machine, Hoxton Street.

Plaid stained glass window in our bedroom.

Jamie's bum in our bedroom.

Mysterious shop, Hoxton Street.

Doorknocker, near Brick Lane.

Locked lock, Regent's Canal.

Building under construction. (It says, "This is a canvas" along the top.)

Fixer-upper, near Victoria Park.

Pink winter blossom and a grey wall, near Columbia Road.

missing the moon, ost

2010-01-20T02:16:00.000-08:00

The soundtrack to an imaginary teen movie, featuring songs and additional score by The Field Mice. Here, interspersed with images from the films that inspired it.

Canada by The Field Mice.
So Bored by Wavves.
Catch by The Cure.
And Before the First Kiss by The Field Mice.
Holiday by The Other Ones.

Porno by Clinic.
Come On Shake It by MC Shy D.
Triangle by The Field Mice.
Somewhere by Barbra Streisand.

The Happening by The Supremes.
Bust a Move by Young MC.
OCD Go Go Girls by Lovvers.
This Love is Not Wrong by The Field Mice.

Rise Above by Dirty Projectors.
Little April Showers by Funny Bunny Easter Gang.
Souvenir by Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark.
Missing the Moon by The Field Mice.
Waitin' for a Superman by The Flaming Lips.

Images from Son of Rambow; One Crazy Summer; Playing For Keeps; Rita, Sue and Bob Too.

quit the day

2010-01-14T11:55:00.000-08:00

Wednesday here was a winter wonderland. The snow sat on the top of branches calmly and gleaming white. Out our window, the trees looked like the ones we were drawing a couple years ago: Branches skimmed in bright white like a glowing outline.

Everything went neatly that day. Some re-design ideas of ours were quite easy to put into reality; a little tinkering here and there, of course, but finishable. The results were printed out and appeared substantial.

The next morning, everything turned to slush. Our alarm didn't go off. We got a letter stamped "pre-court notice." Turns out the year we never got any phone bills suddenly evolved into a letter from a collection agency claiming hundreds of pounds in back payments.

Sometimes the best thing to do is give up. When a day is starting off all wrong, change it. Quit the day. And so we drank a double Jarvie at four in the afternoon and set out to the free Vampire Weekend gig at Somerset House after all.

Somerset House: The view from the front balcony; grand entrance.

Context was everything; the audience watched the band play on a balcony above the Tiffany-sponsored ice skating rink. The columns were lit up blues and purples. We were invited to skate but despite the romance of it all, we declined. It all looked appropriate for the band: Very waspy, very F. Scott Fitzgerald.

My Tiffany's-themed cupcake and a pint of bitter.

A trio of American students stood in front of us. They were rather like the three young geeks from Freaks and Geeks, grown up and studying abroad. "Are they British?" asked The Jewish One regarding the band. (He kept talking about "Jewish" this and that, so I take the liberty of presuming.) "No, they went to Columbia, like me," replied The Almost Cool One. (His hair was just a bit too frizzy.) "They have a song about the bus route I used to take!" he added proudly. "Cross-town?" asked The Goofy One. (He seemed enamored of Almost Cool and quite pleased with his urbane speculation.) "Yep." A little while later, The Jewish One said, "I didn't realize Columbia has a good music program." It was a pretty great line, as if he'd only ever hung out with his dad.

Vampire Weekend.

As we waited for the band to start, we began designing London Las Vegas. "The highest paying guests can have tea with The Queen," said Jamie. "A drag queen," I added. "Trafalgar Square will be the main gambling floor," said Jamie. "And you can just see a bit of Picadilly Circus." "The slot machines," I added.

We left a little early. Vampire Weekend were fine. That wasn't really the point. It was good to be out. We both had to pee, though, and Jamie had to go so badly that he marched us right into Walkabout, the Australian-themed restaurant. "What are we doing? What are we doing?" I whispered as we walked quickly, stiffly, through the vast terrain, past picnic-bench tables of big guys watching sport on big screens against the backdrop of a big grill. I felt distinctly like we were Brett and Jemaine, the New Zealanders from Flight of the Conchords, and that everyone would find out we weren't from Australia and mock our accents. Jamie was experiencing sweet relief, however, peeing at the urinal in front of a video advertisement of a happy family in a park or something like that. "Go go go!" I whispered as we made a swift exit past a pair of hamburgers that, if this was Flight of the Conchords, would break out into song.

We walked along the Thames just a bit, past some hotels and up one of the alleys, peeking through a stage door, getting a bit of a thrill from the ropes and rigs and grease paint. We walked past a traditional pub, illuminated, and through Covent Garden at closing time and took the tube home. Sometimes you just need to go to town.

The next day, I felt determined not to lose another day, slush or no slush. These things are helpful, I find, to the person who works from home: Wake up early. Shower. Get out of the house before noon so that some fresh air hits your skin. Listen to "productive" music. (NO SHOUTS NO CALLS by Electrelane and the WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE soundtrack have been working for me.) To-do lists. Quick meetings. Jeremy? Present. Jamie? Present. Have we got a gig yet, Murray?

radio diaries

2010-01-10T10:05:00.000-08:00

You enter with the ring of a sturdy-sounding bell at Jones Dairy on Ezra Street, and as you close the sturdy-feeling door behind you, it seems like you've gone back in time. We were tempted by the unpasturised cheese. But we're trying not to take in too much dairy as we're getting over our colds. Instead we splashed out on some brown eggs and two loaves of bread, including the soda bread below, which elicited noises (like "mmmm! mmmm!") as we ate it with butter while preparing to make a spaghetti omelet.

Oh, a spaghetti omelet is something that Jamie does with last night's leftover spaghetti. Suppose it is more of a frittata, really; whatever it is, if you can get it to hold together, as Jamie can, even with chick peas, it is very tasty. That's how we cook. Oh, and spicy is good.

Jarvis Cocker's BBC Six show, which I promised to update you about, was a success, I think. With only a bit of fumbling and a genuine sense for banter, he railed against America's marketing of Coca Cola (in a tangent related to the new film version of The Road) and baited listeners to convert him to the charms of the Grateful Dead. I say railed and baited, but he was quite diplomatic about it all, really. The Grateful Dead bit introduced a segment during which listeners suggest a song by a band that Jarvis "doesn't get," and the tune with the most votes is then played towards the end of the show. "The jury's still out," said Jarvis after listening to "Box of Rain." We were equally ambivalent.

Jarvis opened his show with a song called "Snowed In" by Tim Rose, who recorded the album of the same name during the last year of his life. (Producer Colin Winston-Fletcher has compared the process to "trying to tame a lion with a rubber chair.") With that slow, dark entry point, the silky Silk Cut voice of Jarvis led us through a rather contemplative program, with an almost theatrical flourish, nicely complimenting a rather grim but cosy Sunday afternoon. He even read a short story about abandoned Christmas trees by Richard Brautigan. He's got a good reading voice and you hear every word.

Above, our two new cacti, picked up at the flower market for a pound each, saying hello to that little monolithic trooper that's somehow managed to stay alive a few years now despite a constant slight-withering. Jamie thinks they're doomed, can you see the chill on the windowsill alone, but we'll do our best. We try to act like it's California in the kitchen. Kyle, do you remember our winter "summer parties"?

We had gone to the flower market to "collect calls," as I put it, from the vendors for use in one of our London postcard designs. "Three hellaborous for a fiver!" was my favourite; Jamie liked, "Four lupins for a fiver!"

It's nearly seven in the evening here now. The Sunday paper is scattered, the crossword half done. The Speedy one, mind you. We're working on it. BBC 6 Music is still on; we're listening to Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone and C.O.B.'s Spirit of Love is the "featured album" of the show. I think the radio is the centre of our home, don't you? You must have noticed that by now. Oh, and the Marmite jar in the photos says "Marmite is horrid," a bit of British marketing for you, with an irony I suppose you wouldn't find in America with Coke. Eh, Jarvis?

I wish we had a cat. The broken lucky Chinese cat waves gently when it gets strangled by the vacuum cleaner cord. It's not the same, though, as watching a real live furball slowly inhale and exhale as it sleeps.

the cold spell

2010-01-09T07:55:00.000-08:00

A beautiful book, given to us by Jamie's dad, is helping us get through the post-Christmas blues. We haven't even cooked any of the recipes from Tender yet. (For one thing, we're waiting for a replacement refrigerator to be delivered, and in the meantime the milk chills on the windowsill and we can't shop for anything perishable.) But Nigel Slater's thoughtful ruminations on vegetables, paired with images that look more like high art than food photography, lead us into a world of comfort and nourishment, and are getting us prepared for a lot of cooking. Well, I'm sous.

Speaking of tenderness, we've noticed that the gentle work of master filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu is the subject of a two month retrospective at the British Film Institute. I am remembering the Ozu season at the Pacific Film Arhive back when we lived in California. We went to a few of the screenings, and at the last the curator shed a tear.

After the Christmas decorations come down, winter looks bleak. Something about this year's prolonged snowfall is making us turn to the internal meanderings of psychedelic sound. In particular: Wooden Shjips and Stormcock by Roy Harper.

Hibiscus, liquorice root, nettle, echinacea purpurea root, natural raspberry flavour, natural lemon flavour, aloe vera extract. Ahhhhhh...

Sundays in the summer are all about long walks and BBQ, but now we're looking for any excuse to stay inside, and here is a GREAT one: Starting this afternoon at 3:30pm, Jarvis Cocker has his own radio show on BBC 6 Music! Writes The Guardian Guide, "His melodious Yorkshire cadence and endless supply of dry one-liners are tailor-made for radio anyway, so perhaps it was only a matter of time. Plus he's got good taste in music, so we have high hopes for his first regular outing on 6 Music."

SO excited. We'll keep you posted on that program. In the meantime, a quick brisk jaunt to the flower market... This morning there was a boy across the street doing exercises in the snow wearing just shorts and t-shirt. It motivated us to buck up and at least get some fresh air.

january mix tape

2010-01-09T01:17:00.000-08:00

Enter Laughing by Electrelane.
The title makes for a good opener, and anyway this song is just so cool. The octave jumps in the middle make me feel like I'm flying. I miss these girls a lot actually. But they left us wanting more, didn't they.

String Quartet No. 4 by Béla Bartók.
Sister by Sufjan Stevens.
Somewhere between intimate and epic, both of these songs make me think of the next decade. Like a pencil drawing of the apocalypse. "What the water wants is hurricanes, and sailboats to ride on its back."

We Want War by These New Puritans.
If you really were to include this avant-garde 10 inch on a mix for a friend, you'd probably make that friend angry with you. But in our theoretical January mix tape, it is a must: Super intense start to 2010. Released on Monday in the UK.

By Tomorrow by Black Tambourine.
The New Year's hangover lingers: Aren't all of your thoughts still about "tomorrow"?

Accidents on Purpose by Unwound.
I don't know, it just makes sense.

Norway by Beach House.
Totally lush. Actually, sounds a lot like early '90s band Lush. Stands on its own, though, don't get me wrong: The song grows and grows on you, I'd say, until the melody sounds like it was always there. And that's the biggest compliment. Let it get under your skin.

London, London by Caetano Veloso.
Included because we are working on a series of London postcard designs. And for the line, "While my eyes go looking for flying saucers in the sky," a theme which will appear again with the last song on this list.

The First Big Weekend by Arab Strap.
Wishful thinking: A song about summer that sounds like it was written in winter. "So that was the first big weekend of the summer... Starts thursday as usual with the canteen quiz and again no-one wins the big cash prize... Then on friday night we went through to the arches..." And so begins a rambling journal entry of a pop song about getting drunk with friends. And it's quite beautiful, by the way.

Die Slow by Health.
The mix needed something nihilistic-but-danceable, and I can tell that Jamie doesn't like "Bad Romance" by Lady GaGa, even though I (Jeremy) find myself humming it in the shower. This is a better nihilistic dance song anyway.

One Life Stand by Hot Chip.
After all this doom and gloom, the new Hot Chip single offers a bit of hope: Let's get married and move to north London.

Brother Sport by Animal Collective.
I have a cold. I'm confused about my goals. My mind feels like the middle of this song. In other words, CRAZY.

Love is Overtaking Me by Arthur Russell.
Message of the millennium.

Memory of a Free Festival by David Bowie.
I had completely forgotten about this song. Jamie got frustrated with me for not remembering. But what more could you want than to be able to hear a song this good for the first time all over again. It is perhaps another song about summer written in winter. Plus, aliens.

january grit

2010-01-06T06:38:00.000-08:00

January is gritty. Like the sore throat you've got from New Year's Eve cigarettes and the icy air when you've forgotten your scarf. Grit, it's what you put on the pavement so that people don't slip.

We've been using bars of Imperial Leather soap. I keep thinking, this would have been the soap used by Jimmy from Quadrophenia. It's a grandad's soap and I imagine it was once a son's and grandson's, too.

On the way back from the Perigord Noir (a 13 hour journey and five of us in a Skoda), Pete saved our lives by DJing from his iPod. When night fell, he played "The Lady With The Braid" by Dory Previn. The lyrics are sublime. Here, Jarvis Cocker agrees.

Lapsang Souchong, pots of it. It's cold out. Bill Fay: "the frost to awaken my soul."

The scratch of wool and pull of clothes with a slightly odd fit. Jamie's peacoat is a children's size 16; my peacoat is a women's size 14. The feeling of things being slightly off. Complicated by the guilt of not being able to catch up, or get started. Bob Lind, "pursuing something I'm not sure of."

Revisiting These New Puritans' 2007 album Beat Pyramid.

It seems like The Pretenders are always on the radio these days.

The snows fall down, so many big fat flakes. Outside, bobble hats and some people walking careful and slow, others sliding on purpose. John Martyn, "Bless The Weather."

Getting tangled up in fairy lights in the kitchen while the speakers play Beach House's "Norway," almost transcendental! I took them down as Christmas lights but restrung them elsewhere; I couldn't just turn the lights off.

Rue Vielle Du Temple

2009-12-30T04:07:00.000-08:00

Christmas near the Dordogne was spent with wild boars, fresh chestnuts, prehistoric caves and of course loads of wine and cheese.

On the way there, we stopped in Paris and even went up the Eiffel Tower. We drank an expensive whisky at Petit Fer à Cheval on what is perhaps our favourite street, Rue Vieille du Temple.

We'll get our photos developed; in the meantime, some images of Vieille du Temple I quickly collected this morning, combined with excerpts from my notebook which I scrawled on the train.

One never forgets one's special traveling jumper again.

Jamie wants to live in Paris.

Just for the cafés, I think.

Note to self: Practice French.

From The Guardian.

We cannot find The Floor Scrapers at the Orsay. I think it's in storage. But there are real live beautiful boys everywhere.

A very European-looking poster from music promoters Puresong.

At Potager du Marais, a row of Americans; in fact, everyone in the restaurant. Everybody is whispering in order to hide their American English; I think we're all wishing each other were French.

We sit next to a young man with a short beard and v-neck, he speaks in a high voice and sounds like he's from East Coast wealth. That awkwardness. His date is wearing a little too much make-up and I'm imagining their inner monolgues to be like Franny and Zooey.

He hides his face when a man comes selling roses; awkward. "The best thing to do is ignore him," he says. The girl says something I can't hear. "Well, did you want a flower?" he says in his squeaky voice. She kind of mumbles no and the waitress arrives to take their order.

From The Sartorialist.

At the café later, we see a woman has been given a rose, purchased from the same vendor.

From the flickr site of Pieter Baert.

That kid with the big hair and big nose, what Jamie calls the French Classic. He can't stop moving. He has entitlement, says Jamie. He's a young man, owns the world. Like Antoine Doinel. He pushes his ass out. His dad wears a tapestry over his shoulder. Of course he does, says Jamie.

From blog-zinc.

The father and son and his sister are applauded by an elegant black woman, who is stood across the bar slowly eating meat, for their resemblance. She calls them an ensemble, I think. The boy wears a paisley shirt and big scarf and peace symbol bracelet. He has so many things to flop around, says Jamie as the boy continues to move and flop around his big hair and scarf and he is a bit of a star because of his length. Tall, he stands at the bar while his father and sister sit. I think the elegant woman was especially applauding him.

From aliceinsight.

The next morning, the woman serving petit dejuener in the hotel tells us the men in London wear dresses.

From ipreferparis.net

smells like christmas

2009-12-18T11:26:00.000-08:00

We only have a Muji wooden tree this year and not a real live tree. Of course we miss the smell of needles, so it is important that we cultivate Christmas smells. Thanks to Anh for bringing us a Siskiyou Cedar sachet and Paine's Balsam Fir incense, both picked up from the superb Ooga Booga store in Los Angeles. (In London, you can get Paine's incense at Labour and Wait.)

As for treesy music, we've been listening Songs of Shame by Woods; I've become very fond of it.

Our 2009 Minor Pop Awards

2009-12-17T05:14:00.001-08:00

Postmodern Pastiche.
Tie: "Stillness Is The Move," Dirty Projectors; Primary Colors, The Horrors.
Experimentalists Dirty Projectors confound expectations by producing an R&B song that is really good and sounds like a weird homage to Mariah Carey. In a further pomo twist, the song is covered by Beyoncé's little sister, Solange Knowles. With The Horrors second album, the references are fast and furious: The Wedding Present, Can, The Cure, The Silver Apples, Spiritualized, Echo and the Bunnymen... Despite the obviousness, it sounds exciting. And despite the darkness, it feels like a lot of fun.

Best New Band.
The XX.
A cool mix of early Cure and Aaliyah, this is an obvious media favourite and not unknown to the environs of trendy boutiques. But the nail-on-the-head factor is undeniable: The album is sexy and soulful with an effortless kind of songwriting that recalls the exciting first chapter of trip-hop. Solid.

Favourite Live Act.
Health.
Health played several gigs in London, including freebies in record stores, before we finally got around to seeing them. People say they are a good live band, but nothing could prepare us for the visceral sensation of the actual experience. A hyperactively passionate, muscular and compact noise experience, elevated above the impressive mathematics by an eerily beautiful vocal line. "The gnarly setting is beautified by golden androgynous harmonies that envelop everything," explains allmusic.com. Seeing Health at the Garage, where this photo was taken, was a tip-of-the-toes experience from start to finish. (How many times have you found yourself at live shows secretly not wanting an encore? A Health performance leaves you wanting more.) Our most exciting gig since Electrelane's final tour.

Drama Queen.
Wild Beasts.
Taking the reigns from Antony Hegarty, Wild Beasts is the queer art band to get under your skin and drive you wild or perhaps just crazy.

Weirdest Duet.
"Dream Come True Girl," Cass McCombs and Karen Black.
Anything with Karen Black just automatically becomes weird. Her performance in Day of the Locust still haunts us from time to time. Cass McCombs perfectly casts her in this modern day jukebox number. Like a jukebox from Twin Peaks.

Hottest Video.
Tie: "Cornerstone," Arctic Monkeys; "Kiss Of Life," Friendly Fires.
A beautiful boy standing still with an awkward tape recorder strapped across his chest. And a beautiful boy dancing freely on exotic shores like somebody's drunk aunt in a wedding tent. Each a bit gawky, one sedentary and the other seismic, but somehow both totally sexy.

Late Entry/Dark Horse.
Tie: Bill Callahan; Richard Hawley.
In the UK, Richard Hawley was suddenly everywhere: At BBC Electric Proms with full orchestra and Lisa Marie Presley, on BBC Six singing Christmas carols in his melancholy baritone accompanied by musical saw. "The Johnny Cash of Sheffield" seems to be crossing over from cult classic to household name. In the rustic kitchens of folksy friends everywhere, it was Bill Callahan's somehow perfect album "Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle" that best complimented spilled red wine, sneaky cigarettes and meandering conversation. You don't just hear this album, you live it. A high point in Callahan's slow burning and periodically dazzling career as a saturnine guitarist and brilliant lyricist of the prosaic ("I went in search of ordinary things, like how can a wave possibly be"). Future legend.

Song of the Year.
"Hellhole Ratrace," Girls.
An odd little contender, part shoegaze noodler, part lighter-in-the-air soft rock power ballad, Hellhole Ratrace felt like an instant classic. It's both familiar and elusive, a strong song from a vulnerable voice, a song with which we will look back upon and remember this year. In slow motion.

Secret of the Year.
Bonfires on the Heath, The Clientele.
Allmusic.com wrote, "they may have created the most perfect, autumnal, English pop record imaginable." It is true this is the record we fell in love with from September through November, listening to it over and over, smelling bonfires in the air, resisting our heavy winter coats and instead holding on to our tweedy fall jackets, because we wanted autumn to last forever. With this album playing in the background. The Clientele's free acoustic gig upstairs at The Lexington a couple of Sunday afternoons ago became a late entry into our special moments of the year.

Minor Pop Moments (which isn't a bad thing at all).
Shortlist:
"French Navy," Camera Obscura;
"Lisztomania," Phoenix;
"Wild Young Hearts", Noisettes;
"Walkabout," Atlas Sound (Featuring Noah Lennox);

"Let's Go Surfing" and "I Feel Stupid," The Drums;
"So Bored," Wavves;
"Summertime Clothes," Animal Collective;

"Young Adult Friction," The Pains of Being Pure at Heart;
"Nothing to Worry About," Peter, Björn and John;
"Two Weeks," Grizzly Bear;
"Hurt Feelings," Flight of the Conchords.
I recently noticed a pull quote on an ad for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, and it said "Epic and intelligent pop." And I was thinking, you know, pop doesn't need to epic and I'm not even sure about intelligent. Certainly there are room for songs that are whimsical, bouncy and special; songs that you want to hear in pubs, songs with videos that crack you up. These songs helped us through our humdrum weekday commutes and perked us up on the weekends. Thank you for the music.

art day

2009-12-11T14:00:00.000-08:00

"Art is really popular these days," said Jamie as we prepared to attend the last day of the blockbuster Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. It was to be open until midnight, when the more ephemeral of the sculptures would be shut down, finding themselves a final visual state.

It was a funny feeling settling in amongst the throngs of people — as crowded as at an Underground station — waiting for a thirty-ton mass of red wax to move at an interminably slow pace though five galleries.

The exhibit was a good deal of fun — it felt both robust and whimsical, challenging and entertaining. And this from an artist who says, "I have often said that I have nothing to say as an artist."

This image (of our boots, again) just doesn't do justice to the mind-altering experience of the room of mirrors. They were like sophisticated fun fair mirrors: They made you look weird, and at moments they'd make others look, as Jamie put it, as though they'd appeared from an alternate universe. With some, you couldn't see yourself until just the right angle, when your face would suddenly overtake the mirrored surface. With others, you felt as though you were going to fall in, so disorienting was the perspective. Watching others experience the mirrors was like watching people trip on drugs... They stood goofily, their Cartesian reality intact to outsiders, yet you knew they were undergoing some kind of mind alteration.

At "Shooting Into The Corner," in which a cannon blasts red wax once every twenty five minutes, we again crowded in with a throng of onlookers. The young gallery assistant who was set to fire the cannon had a floppy wave of hair and a theatrical poise as he prepared the cannon. He stood alert, with hands spread wide and open, until the precise moment when he was to let loose the shell of red wax, weighing nearly twenty pounds, at a speed of fifty miles per hour. Waiting with anticipation, the crowd was like the physical incarnation of a bunch of internet voyeurs waiting for the money shot in a live cam jerk off. His load hit the far wall and the audience erupted in applause. I got the giggles.

In the last room, "When I Am Pregnant" was simply a swollen round shape that somehow looked completely flat from straight on. "What are we looking at?" said a sweet older woman. I pointed out that she should walk to the side and a protrusion would become apparent. "So it does!" she smiled. "An optical illusion."

Tripping through the open air — past the animated clocks in front of Fortnum and Mason, the old fashioned department store, and through the Christmas follies (and climate change protesters) of Trafalgar Square — we stopped for a whisky and Guinness at Retro Bar. Jamie was loving the gaudy decorations.

Our final art pilgrimage of the day was to cross the brisk Thames for a program of film shorts at the Tate Modern. By the time we emerged, people on the streets were starting to stumble a bit from their after work spirits. Friday night in the capitol.

market day

2009-12-10T10:18:00.000-08:00

We were indulgent today; you know that day in December when you wind up Christmas shopping for yourself instead of others? I picked up the new Apartamento magazine at Artwords, and the free zine Pix because of it's amazing portrait of the boys from These New Puritans shaving each other's heads. We went to Franco's next door, and ate Italian and looked through the magazines a little and talked about stationery ideas, without a notebook to write stuff down.

Jamie got a beautiful new pair of Hudson boots. Here's his new brown boots on the pavement at Spitalfields Market.

The slide we bought for four pounds at the market. It's called Master Tommy Says Goodnight. There were other things we wanted, of course: A 1970s school ruler with green stripes and Gils Sans font, an Italian lamp. This was the one thing we had to have.

A small Christmas decoration in the gardens behind Folgate Street.

This is just the part where old streets that Jack the Ripper walked meet new glass buildings.

The Christmas decorations in front of Dennis Severs' House.

Jamie ordering a half-pint at Bricklayers' Arms. I told you we were having an indulgent day. Notice the Merry Christmas sign in the window.

the corner house

2009-12-10T03:16:00.000-08:00

Everybody when they're young needs to live on the outskirts of town. Not where it's the suburbs yet, but the places where the building height fades a bit, and the post offices seem grumpy or lonely-feeling, and you have your own secret park, and you wonder late at night at the club how you're ever going to get back home.

Jamie and I have lived in a lot of these neighbourhoods: One was one the street we all called "The End Of The World." It was so windy it hurt, and the street was so steep that one time a drunk driver let his car roll right through our front door when he was trying to park. We had secret places that we felt nobody knew about, like the Mexican sandwich place, and we spent time online daring each other to do scandalous things.

These are the places where your imagination stretches a bit more, and you feel a bit of space around your head, the kind of space we try to include in the artwork for our cards and calendars; there's something ruminative about these areas.

Quinnford and Scout have the address number 1, because there is only one house on their street; it's just their flat and then it becomes a parking lot. (The hair salon below their flat takes its address from the cross street as it's on a corner.)

Quinnford and Scout live near a vegetarian restaurant and an underground bar that we never got around to going to (though in central Manchester, we did go to the underground bar in a former Victorian toilet) and a load of charity shops. Quinnford and Scout ride bikes when they don't take the bus. Their flat has really tall ceilings. Everybody's favorite thing, that and hardwood floors, no? (Why do people say hardwood?) Anyway, they don't have wood floors, they have a carpet that they often use for lovemaking. Perhaps you've seen the pictures; they take lots of lusty ones.

It's here in this flat on the outskirts that they have a kind of secret laboratory of creativity: A quiet, clever, lustful and sweet creativity, their lines informed by both graphical minimalism and rustic music by bearded men. They do this and that, take pictures, illustrate, design, come up with fake companies (Wildlight makes light bulbs shaped like animals). Scout cooks (except when Quinnford chops the onions); Quinnford sings a lot, and dances. He said one time that he modeled his facial expressions on the dog he grew up with, and it suddenly made sense the looks of adoration he gives Scout with his sparkling eyes. You can practically see his tail wag.

Here we read books and made two leatherette couches into a "cube" in which to sleep at night, and watched episodes of TIN TIN and a bootleg of PONYO of such good quality that we didn't know it was filmed at a cinema, until somebody's silhouette appeared, a woman getting up for the toilet then returning a few minutes later.

My second favourite part of Manchester is the canals, which reminded me of A TASTE OF HONEY, a film which I incessantly talked about. If you walk into town from the canals, you pass by what used to be The Hacienda, and is now luxury flats (its ground floor car park is clad in metal with laser cut Hacienda facts: When The Jesus And Mary Chain played, and when so-and-so DJed, and the Happy Mondays and so on.) If you keep going, you get to Canal Street, which is the gay district. Quinnford used to wait tables at a place called Queer. If I lived in Manchester, I would walk along the canals, across its bridges, under the trains, just like Rita Tushingham and her camp gay friend in TASTE OF HONEY.

Along the bus route into town, we'd pass the BBC; it's where Radcliffe and Maconie live, is what Jamie would say. Radio floats like a fairy tale; any concrete building that contains it will almost seem like a prison.

My first favourite part of Manchester is Quinnford and Scout's dark blue, high ceilinged, slightly damp flat. There is a stately and modern and impressive cultural centre in Manchester called Cornerhouse; but Quinnford and Scout's is my corner house: The only house on the street, except the hair salon, which takes its address from the cross street because it's on the corner.

restless mind

2009-12-09T06:18:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about Mark Robinson. Through his band Unrest, he introduced me to the American painter Isabel Bishop. I liked his graphic design for his record label TeenBeat so much that I even put a fold-out photocopied mail order form on my bedroom wall. (That was the little room above 16th Street between Valencia and Guerrero; what a summer.) I stole the title of the Unrest song "Make Out Club" for a chapbook of autobiographical writing I did a few years back. (Some guy in Boston built a whole social network site called makeoutclub.com in the early 2000s, and it really was a precursor to Friendster and MySpace and Facebook and all that, and by the looks of things, it's still going.) But back to Mark: Mark Robinson is totally a secret hero, and I think the history of indie music is a bit brighter because of him.

a grey day...

2009-12-09T05:00:00.000-08:00

...is the right time for Swedish pop.

...should smell like balsam fir.

...and a cup of coffee and Cabinet magazine.

...and I don't know whether I can watch any more episodes of Cracker, it's so very bleak.

...turns to night; shall we go to see the lights in Hyde Park?

good morning

2009-11-29T03:47:00.000-08:00

Granola (by Jamie Atherton by way of Jamie Oliver)

makes enough to fill one jar

200g rolled oats
150g mixed nuts (hazelnuts, almonds, walnuts, brazil nuts)
50g mixed seeds (sunflower, pumpkin, sesame and poppy if you please)
50g dessicated coconut
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
150g (or less if you're us) dried fruit (we use apricots but you could add cranberries or raisins)
5 tablespoons runny honey (or maple syrup)
5 tablespoons olive oil

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas 4. Put your dry granola ingredients, including the coconut and cinnamon but not the dried fruit, on a baking tray. Stir well and smooth out. Drizzle with the honey and a little olive oil and and stir again. Place the tray in the preheated oven for 25 to 30 minutes. Every 5 minutes or so, take the granola out and stir it, then smooth it down with a wooden spoon and put it back into the oven. While it's toasting, roughly chop up any large dried fruit. When the granola is golden, remove it from the oven, mix in the dried fruit and let it cool down.

Once cooled, serve the granola with milk and/or a dollop of natural yoghurt. We keep it stored in a medium-sized airtight Le Parfait jar.

leapt from the page?

2009-11-27T14:48:00.000-08:00

This feels a bit like a TV commercial by the end, but I couldn't help but be reminded of our own drawings when I watched this.

cycle

2009-11-25T04:42:00.000-08:00

It's the first chance I've had to write in awhile. It's less grey this morning; I am hoping for a bright and crisp afternoon, my favourite kind.

The radio is playing good stuff: Spiritualized, Magic Numbers, Big Pink, Primal Scream already. (Spiritualized's Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space is Six Music's "Album of the Day," presumably in anticipation of it being performed in its entirity at The Barbican next month.)

Jamie made toast with marmite. Perhaps a walk later. I've got myself a new wool cap. I'm determined it's not time for coats yet; it's still jacket weather, barely. Wool and flannel and corduroy, plaid and chocolate brown and grey, scratchy and soft, scented with last winter's smells; slightly creased.

I figured I'd use this opportunity to catch up:

Jamie's sister Lucy has opened up a folksy shop called Snow Pony, stocking her originals, editions and a Christmas card set.

We've got a Christmas card set, too!

I realised that I never wrote about our trip California; I can't even deal now... Take a look at Jamie's flickr photos instead. Especially the food photos!!!

I was just going to put in a gratuitous image of the total hotties from The Drums, but now that the DJ says he's got The Drums and The Cure coming up after the news, I have a sort of narrative excuse. I delight in the link. "Tenuous," says Jamie from across the room.

Some awesome kid blogged about our stuff being sold in a design shop on Castro Street in San Francisco, in the location which used to be Harvey Milk's camera shop. Now the really cyclical thing is, after it belonged to Milk but before it became this new design shop, this same space was occupied by a natural beauty products shop called Skin Zone. I worked there for a few months when I first moved to San Francisco. I got to mix my own scented lotions; that part was pretty fun. I remember I made a Goth Love Potion that is probably like the world's least subtle perfume, but me and Tara really liked it at the time.

I've mentioned to you that me and Anh and guest contributors are doing a blog about Los Angeles + London, rather confusingly entitled dotcomdotcodotuk.

My pal Matt Wolf, director of the Arthur Russell documentary Wild Combination, has created a good tumblr of esoteric ephemera; it feels like an awesome fanzine.

We saw a bootleg of Ponyo in Manchester. A brilliant reminder of how high Hayao Miyazake is on our list of influences. Magic.

More on Manchester, soon.

episodes

2009-11-14T05:25:00.000-08:00

Late autumn light on our wardrobe; a chubby squirrel photographed a few weeks ago in Bunyan Fields cemetery.

Autumn, that favourite of seasons, sadly does not linger. This year, it appeared to be in a rush. Those trees of gold and red and orange that give a feeling of exhilaration (back-to-school! bonfires!) are now emptied out, already, to be left bare. You can see through the trees in front of our flat. "I do like that you can see the Barbican again," says Jamie. "You can see the lights coming on in the towers."

Nowadays the lights come on by four in the afternoon. The days have become so short. And sometimes it brings you down: You find yourself stepping not on crunchy leaves, but on soggy newspapers. It rains. There's a bit of a lull, after the autumnal anticipation, but before the festive season. Perhaps that is why people force Christmas preparations on us so far in advance.

Anh Do on our couch in early November; the contents of my bag.

I heard John Martyn's "Bless The Weather" on the radio; "sublime," the DJ said when it had finished. I listened to "It's Just The Weather" by Alfie on my headphones. Then I've noticed people turning to wistful girl bands: The Cardigans and The Concretes are being played at the shop where I keep a part-time job; I keep noticing mention of The Sundays. Their composition "Can't Be Sure" pops up on the new James Figurine Covers album. "England, my country, the home of the free, such miserable weather."

So it's less of the dense shoegazing records that sound like smoke and fog (The Verve, Girls and Clientele that brought me into autumn) and more of the snowflake pop that trips across ice and knocks on the door of a house made of candy. "Carnival" by The Cardigans. Add to that some icy disco and the kind of glittering glam that soars like an empty sky. (I've been listening to a lot of Bowie and Suede, too.)

The lovely art couple Quinnford and Scout in our lounge in mid-October.

One solution to the blues is to find a new television series, or revisit one of your favourites. Jamie and I are indulging the full box set of one of our all-time favourite detective shows, Jimmy McGovern's Cracker, starring Robbie Coltrane. "This is so melancholy," said Jamie over the first episode last night. Maybe I'm just tired, but the way a passing train or a pair of car headlights is filmed can bring tears to my eyes. The gritty noir footage of Manchester is also helping us psyche up for our first ever trip to that city next weekend. We've also been watching loads of Peep Show off the internet and settling into the quiz shows, Buzzcocks, of course, and Have I Got News For You, as well.

All this TV watching makes me miss Kyle. For months and months when he lived in London, we watched Battlestar Galactica. This carried us from the colder months deep into bright summer. We even skipped a trip to Paris, in part so that we could race through the final episodes of BSG before Kyle moved back to Canada.

Come on over to our house, all you friends who owe us a visit: We light tea candles and make multiple cups of tea. Rooibus, always, for me. We are cooking dark winter foods from deep in the earth. (Remember the link to that article I posted? Did you get around to reading it?) We've got the radio on and people will begin talking about Christmas. The new Ian Brown single, "it's kind of Christmasey," the DJ said today, in that vague way; the way I find "Hitsville U.K." by The Clash to be Christmasey. The kinds of songs Prince Nelly plays. I'll see you later, down the pub.

jay

2009-11-14T02:54:00.000-08:00

Our strapping and adventurous friend Jay Simpson stopped through on his way to spending a year in Africa. I kept trying to capture his beautiful eyes with the camera on my mobile phone, which proved a bit of a challenge. I think I finally got it here, up on the top floor of the Tate Modern, across from the windows that look across the Thames. That's all of London reflected in his eyes, then.

Jay reminds me of Errol Flynn.

When we have guests visit, I have come to realise that it can be a challenge to give them a glimpse of the city; London is too meandering, sprawling and diverse. We often bring people up to the top floor of the Tate for a quick, albeit truncated, orientation.

Here, Jay took our photo back.

tapes and tapes

2009-11-05T04:55:00.001-08:00

I've always thought Alex Turner was as cute as the Babycham deer, but to be honest no single Arctic Monkeys song has ever quite stuck with me until this one. Bit of a Richard Hawley knockoff, but who's complaining.

Isn't it pretty darn cute that the video was released last month, in sync with the October page of the Atherton Lin calendar?

shelf life

2009-11-04T01:22:00.000-08:00

Of course Waitrose vitamins are packaged like Penguin paperbacks.

This one's for Kyle... we miss you here in London.

night and the city

2009-11-02T12:28:00.000-08:00

London is looking legendary and I am here to know its autumn. We are still listening to "Bonfires on the Heath" by The Clientele, even though the lyric goes "...late October sunlight in the wood..."

Some photos from my mobile...

Bruton Place, a secret little street off Berkeley Square.

This car actually pulled up and parked on Mount Street. It's a Cadillac.

Jamie in the glow of Old Street. A couple night later, on Halloween, it was absolutely packed even at 3:30 am. Like Temple Bar in Dublin. We were dressed as superheroes. This is our neighbourhood; it's become a bit "hen party," but we still love it.

The fallen leaves have blanketed the pavements and squares. Here, a view from our bedroom of the crunchy yellow duvet on the square across the street. Did you know, oddly, I've never set foot in this square? In the warmer months, hot men play tennis and basketball on the courts.

I can't WAIT for the fireworks in Victoria Park on Saturday night. That's for Guy Fawkes night; there's a whole carnival, you know. The lights at night. Maybe a beer afterwards at The Approach? Has it become my favourite holiday? Night, it comes on so pure. When you get a moment, read this, it's lovely.

sightseeing

2009-10-21T06:19:00.000-07:00

Scout and Quinnford upstairs at Maison Bertaux.

Last weekend we had the honour of a visit from Colin and Oisín, otherwise known as Quinnford and Scout, our favourite gay art couple from Manchester, if not the world.

At the moment of this photo, actually, there is a convergence of gay art couples: It was us with Quinnford and Scout, sitting upstairs at Maison Bertaux bakery, surrounded by the exhibition of originals by famous New York-Icelandic gay art/music couple Jónsi & Alex. (If that was not enough, the next night we found ourselves drinking wine with Stefano from Entr'ouvert, the gay art photography couple from Aix-en-Provence, France.)

Quinnford's sparkling eyes and Scout's puppy grin made for super charming company. Quinnford is always rattling off the name of every font he sees. Also, he is incredibly naughty. This morning, we discovered the "Quinnford" tag he left on a box in our flat. And Scout is very tasty. What we mean is, he is super talented at baking, cooking and selecting wine. You can quickly see why these two are madly in love with each other.

Having the boys in London made us fall in love with the city again. The magnitude of it is most apparent when you're wanting to show all of it to somebody new. We settled on little corners and pockets here and there: We walked through crowds of tweedy strollers munching on hot food at Broadway Market, and smiling couples carrying home large plants from Columbia Road Flower Market. We lined up at shopfront windows for fried shrimp with sweet chili sauce and cappucinos that took a long time to make. We didn't care: We'd talk. We walked across Tower Bridge and over fountains at The Barbican and we even walked into the darkness in the famous new installation at the Turbine Hall.

Oisín had the best idea: We went for the first time to the London Transport Museum, which is a total gem. The collection of poster art is inspiring, and articulates the design orientation of the London Transport, something that is easy to take for granted in one's usual rush. Also, you get to walk into actual vintage buses and tube carriages, which is a total thrill. You sit with mannequins modeling the fashions of the era at hand.

We feel bonded to Quinnford and Scout's approach to art and life. We are very very lucky to know them and to get to share ideas and stories with them.

Jamie Atherton Lin with Oísin from Quinnford and Scout marking out a map of London.

Drunk and sweaty late Sunday night at one of our local gay bars, The Joiners' Arms, we got a sweet glance from the mighty photographer Wolfgang Tillmans as he hopped onto his bicycle and rode away; it was like being smiled upon by a gay art guardian angel.

mystery boys

2009-10-21T01:50:00.000-07:00

We saw Girls last night at Hoxton Bar. Girls were epic, by the way, but the opening act pictured here was basically the sexiest band I've ever seen. They look like they came from the imagination of Hedi Slimane. Just two skimpy boys and some really impressive playing, too. It's loud stomping garage rock with super skills. I was trying to figure out what they were called because they only mumbled their name, and it sounded like he said Tom Tom Bombs.

With a little help (from Ewan of Trouble Records) I learned that they're called Swanton Bombs. With a little research, I figured out that the drummer seems to always go shirtless and the sleeveless singer is Eugene McGuinness' little brother Dominic, written about on this very blog not so long ago, wherein he was compared to a drawing by my sister Jenny.

Of course! We should have put it together. Both times we saw him play, last night and a few weeks back with his brother Eugene, Jamie said exactly the same thing: "What a head of hair."

the big smoke

2009-10-09T02:56:00.000-07:00

Cross-referencing my Graham Greene novel with a vintage London picture book late into the night. And I'm feeling determined that this coming winter, I want to be a tourist and see some of the London sights I haven't gotten around to seeing.

safe in the rain

2009-10-08T10:36:00.001-07:00

Geesh, it is getting cold already, and while Jamie and I were running in the rain from the Museum Tavern to the Renoir Cinema to catch the new Agnes Varda movie, I felt very much a part of London life.

A bit of a cold coming on, and I'm wanting to cosy up inside and...

Listen to the new record by The Clientele.

Re-read ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE by Dylan Thomas, a book about a boy with his finger stuck in a Bass Ale bottle.

Run through the rain again to watch Agnes Varda's BEACHES OF AGNES for a second time.

Cuddle up with our vintage copy of The House Book by Terence Conran and daydream.

Images taken from Innumerable Goods website.

Get some work done. Here's Jamie wrapped up in a hoodie working on one of our Christmas cards.

Re-watch, and this one feels like quite an exciting idea, BBC's classic John Le Carré shows, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY and SMILEY'S PEOPLE.