cultural collective

In the last couple of weeks or so I've had a quite few friends/familien visiting, and therefore have played the role of tourist visiting numerous attractions/galleries etc. Here are some highlights:



This badass mofo is a lion fish, they have a ton of them at the London Aquarium, and loads of other underwater critters that were pretty cool. Don't make the school boy error of going during a school holiday though, hideous children EVERYWHERE.



This is a print by Japanese woodblock print maker Tsukioka Kogyo, whose work is exhibited at one of my favourite museums, the V&A. His works depict scenes of traditional Japanese Noh Theater, and focus on the decorative costumes of the performers, as illustrated above.




The Natural History Museum was okay, if you're into rocks and taxidermy and things like that. The dinosaur skeletons were pretty impressive. Again, don't go during a school holiday.




I spent ages pouring over this exhibition by Ed Kienholz at the National Gallery. An installation piece called 'The Hoerengracht', it recreates the red light district in the 80's. Having been to the red light district recently I found it paticularly interesting, and really felt I could identify the messages Kienholz was trying to get across.

feel sick and dirty more dead than alive

Staring down at the loose turquoise and navy threads of my dogtooth jacket I felt distinctly listless. I felt as though my life was spinning out from under me at a dizzying rate and I needed to come up for air.

I think (as I always do on the northern line) about the way that you can only see the torsos of people in the reflection on the windows, everyone truncated and interchangeable, like a rubix cube of mass humanity. Lovely.

Black Cat White Cat

One cool summer evening at a festival I met a hippy with blonde dreadlocks and an admiration for my Gogol Bordello hoodie. Her name was Amy, and as we sat and smoked under the crooked umbrella of the gaff, which was inhabited by a flock of mostly attractive foreign men dressed as old women, Rachael just having finished her Double Decker, we talked amongst other things about a shared love of gypsy swing music and she recommended a film to me called Black Cat White Cat, by Emir Kusturica. A year or so later and I've finally got round to watching it, and I'm glad I did.

The film is about two gypsy families and their connected lives in Serbia by the Danube River. It consists mainly of farcical portrayals of the gypsy community and includes hilarious characters such as Ggra Pitic, a retired gangster who speeds around the countryside in a bizzare looking wheelchair drinking whiskey and making outlandish requests (pictured above sporting his snazzy gold glasses and gold tooth). Meanwhile the two romances within the storyline unfurl, the story all the while accompanied by a sprinkling of music from Emir Kusturica's famous travelling gypsy band. Highly commendable.

Here's a taste:

Topless Sprinkle Cakes & Cupcake Umentionables

Were mine and Ixchelt's burlesque monikers...a pretty good double act oui, though I prefer a name with 'von' in it I think. So anyway, off we trotted to the Shoreditch high st penthouse studio for our very first burlesque workshop.

Our teacher was Miss Glory Pearl, an extremely confident and curvacious woman who proceded to lead us through a series of bump and grinds (somewhat different to the type littering r&b music videos) shimmy and shakes and pin up poses with gusto and a large dollop of good humour.

The routine we perfected within the hour and a half workshop involved titilating teasing with feather foas, slow and seductive stroking of limbs and a striptease starting with our skirts and ending with our brassieres, which we eventually removed (so that the audience, had there been one, could 'say hello to the girls').

Overall it was an eye opening hour and a half and most importantly a real laugh, and despite not rushing out to buy nipple tassels after I would thoroughly recommend the experience to anyone, though maybe not the faint hearted...

birdseyeview

"Poetry...is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private."

- Allen Ginsberg

Different people have peculiar tastes

I saw my first ever male pole dancer today, he was the teacher in the class before ours and had extremely tight, short, colourful 'pants' on, he was quite a sight... Had a brilliant lesson though, my favourite move in this level is probably the horizontal hook:

Pretty dramatic, though nowhere near as impressive as the moves in the more advanced levels which I should be doing in a couple of months. Really wish I could assemble a pole in halls but I have a feeling the ceiling isn't sturdy enough, and don't fancy paralysing myself from the neck down for the remainder of my life. When we get a house in September (preferably an old, town house style one with high ceilings, maybe in New Cross) I am definitely investing in a pole.

This is, in my opinion, one of if not the best pole dancers in the world, Elena Gibson (also pictured above, and founder of Pole Dance School, which is the school I attend). Although I like Felix Kane etc too, she just doesn't have such grace and poise. Beautiful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WZ-1iDBtls