Notes from July

I stepped out of the Tesco and polished my Pink Lady apple on my shirt. As I stepped in to Whitechapel High Street, a man called me over and asked me for change. “Just for cup of tea,” he said, and I shook my head “no.” He had clear powder blue eyes and a green checkered shirt, and he shook as he spoke. “I’m going to kill myself,” he told me. “I’m going to kill myself tonight,” he called, as I walked away.

At the crosswalk to the Bell Foundry I thought about what I’d done. Back home, none of this situation would happen. For one, I wouldn’t be eating an apple, a simple orchard fruit. Back home, I wasn’t poor, and I wouldn’t buy basic ingredients and eat them as a meal. Back home, I would have a soy latte and biscotti for sustenance, a soy misto to maintain.

Back home I wouldn’t have to answer no for a request for change. I seldom offer money to the panhandlers that litter the streets, but I heartlessly, and naively, thought that they didn’t need it. Here, it’s clear that the people asking for money are completely penniless, but I know now that their requests for tube fare or coffee money are just covers for their fix. And here, I can’t afford to share my change, because I need it for the same. That 70p might not get me on the train but it might tomorrow, when I find another pound under my bed in an accidental cleaning blitz. The loose dimes and nickels might translate into a paper cup of filter coffee at a later date.

Earlier today I walked through Ladbroke Grove, up a street I don’t usually take on my way to work. I ran into my coworker, the stock boy who struts in a sort of cartoon sitting motion as his jeans fall lower off his hips. He didn’t see me right away, with his ball cap and shaggy black hair covering his face, Pendulum and Incubus pulsating in his headphones.

At 10am he brought me a coconut coffee from the fair trade organic where I spend my nickels and dimes on special or miserable occasions. When we talk, it’s usually about work or girls or our weekends… nothing in particular, now that I think hard about it. But he’s still one of my favourites, soft spoken and funny, unassuming in the way that he spends his nights getting high in his friends’ living rooms playing video games, or in Farringdon to see his Thai “girl.”

He never tells us her name and I know nothing about her, but I hear she’s quite a looker “if you’re into that sort of thing.” When he goes out, it’s to Fabric, or Sports Bar for pound-ninety-nine drinks, or to the pub after football. He has the best style out of anyone I work with but his clothes never quite fit.

In the morning I worked the tills, chatting with customers, finding out how they spend their time in Notting Hill. A stylist, a publishing agent, a couple taking a break from their family in North London for a day browsing the market… An attractive forty-year-old came forward with a stack of sweatpants and I suppressed the urge to josh him on his choice of casual wear. Turns out it’s not appropriate to make fun of people’s purchases.

I asked what he was up to this afternoon, a little sooner than I intended, but I couldn’t back out now. “Spending the day at the recording studio, actually” which perked my ears up. “What do you do? Are you a producer?” I asked. Everyone in Notting Hill is a writer or producer or production assistant or something that finances celebrity-based entertainment. “It’s mine,” he answered. “I’m in a band.”

Not wanting to pry, and not wanting to pry to discover that it was nothing worth prying apart, I asked “what type of music?” “Pop,” he said, so I knew I should probably ask more. You don’t make pop music if you don’t want to be known, so I went ahead. “What’s your band called? Do you have a good name?”

“Have you heard of Take That?” he said. I blushed really red, which I never do, and suddenly felt a bit star-stuck, a mix of self-conscious and ambitious, curious, and wry. “I should know who you are,” I mumbled, “I’ve heard of you guys but I don’t know what British pop stars look like, coming from Canada.”

“I guess we weren’t very big in North America,” he said. “No, you weren’t,” was my immediately-regretted reply.

He took his sweats and headed into Portobello, off to lay new tracks with Gary Barlow and the rest. The first British pop star that I’d spoken to casually and who had once graced my walls from a poster out of Bunty made off into the street.

Fake addresses

I used to pal around with this kid from Central St Martins that hung around the skate park, stalked foxes (the British equivalent of raccoons) and never had a cell phone because he was the most broke person I've known since my own arrival to the City.

We would lurk around Hampstead Heath on Thursday nights eating Sainsbury's pies and buying matches for underage smokers and sit in Tower Hamlet council estates until sunrise.

The last time I spoke to him, I had returned from a week in Barcelona to find our resident mouse dead on my duvet. It had climbed into one of the perspex boxes that I used to sort my makeup and expired in a pile of Bourjois blush and cuticle oil. My impoverished pal would have come to Settles Street to stuff it and wear it as a trophy if I had given him my address, but in the end I put the transparent coffin and the bed sheets in the trash outside and said a little prayer for the rodent's family.

He painted me on a mirror and swore he would break it before it was finished. I can't tell if I'm offended or honoured and I feel a little arrogant putting it online.



Source: Oszar (UK)

and justice for everyone!

Since cloistering myself in Canada for the season, I've started creeping London street blogs, looking for my friends and all the people I used to run in to at parties still out after 3am in E1.












My favourite night in London started with several flats of free beer and pretzel sticks in Portobello with my favourite coworker and my BFF. We ditched early, trekked to the Central line, and alighted at Bank to pee in an alleyway before resuming our Underground journey to Old Street. Upon arriving, we began the search for sold-out Stag & Dagger festival tickets, which ended the second we arrived in Shoreditch and were ushered into the Ed Banger party by a fortuitously situated, soft-spoken and well-connected friend from my first night at Hoxton. Showing up in time for SebastiAn and DJ Falcon's set, we settled in for illicit activities in a back corner with some acquaintances and their boyfriends - motherfucking Busy P and his black leather jacket-wearing Justice crew.

Speaking of, here is a nice fifteen minute mix to dress to for fall:
Justice - Dior S/S 09

Source: Glamcanyon (UK), Missing Toof (USA)

Topshop Unique A/W 2008

It's getting chilly.








I hope these are made from a really scratchy cashmere wool blend.

Source: Marie Claire (UK)

Chicken stacker

Hoxton Kitchen - the easiest place to spend a Friday night with a heated patio, bar, restaurant, full stage and dance floor under one roof.

The New Yorkers from that exceptional night in Kew Gardens following their set in Kilburn flew in for the weekend and I returned the guitar that had sat collecting dust (but looking really cool) under the [legally acquired] palm plant in our living room over the summer.

We hit up the Commercial for a round of lager and limes with Salt and Vineager Real McCoys (they're rippled) and I got the call I'd been crossing my fingers for all week - an invitation to the Hoxton Kitchen 10th anniversary party. The place was closed down for the night and they opened the bar and kitchen to anyone who's ever played Boombox, Style Noire and all the amazing live sets over the past decade. All night, we drank as many mojitos, champagne and vodka tonics as could drown out the miniature hamburgers being handed around the party by [little people] dressed in KISS makeup and Afro wigs while Paul Simon remixes reverberated.

Outside, the Jew stood waiting with an entourage of eight, and I left in an unmarked cab - the kind most frequently found outside clubs when the last thing you want is a ride from a stranger with a 1997 sedan hissing "taxi taxi" under his breath as you pass.

When I awoke the next morning (afternoon), my head was buzzing, my hair was a shambles, and my cell phone was missing from my bag. I buttoned an oversized flannel shirt over the previous night's dress and pulled on pair of men's brogues to shuffle outside and find it.

I called from a payphone (the one next to the park that tactfully does not inform its patrons that under its lawns are buried over a hundred hanged criminals from the 1700s) and a Middle Eastern voice ansdwered. My sweet little Samsung with the joystick scroll button had fallen under the taxi seat in my haze and haste, and the driver offered to bring it by my apartment later that night.

Most British people live their lives through their cell phones, much like Americans do with the Internet, and I felt disoriented and cut off from the world without mine. I spent the day in bed eating 99p KFC sandwiches and leftover mixed garlic- and mandarin-stuffed olives from Harrods, reading Mexican graphic design blogs and watching the mouse that until now had shyly rustled out of eyesight running back and forth across the room and under the covers of Joanna's unoccupied bed.

At 8pm, the driver arrived and rang the doorbell. As many times as I've been pickpocketed, ripped off, duped and hassled in the city, it was a reassuring moment that reminded me there are still people who are kind and helpful and inherently everything that I associate with the utopian world outside the dirty East End.

Barnett Newman

Another day at the Tate Modern, with several GBs of unmixed music in my ears and a pair of vintage riding boots on my feet. I sat in front of these paintings for over an hour and thought existential thoughts and then sat by Tower Bridge until sunset.


Eve, 1950


Adam, 1952

Source: Tate Modern (UK)

A blanket statement

If you live in East London you own at least two of the following: a fixed gear bike, a vintage camera from a Berlin flea market, a screen printed t-shirt from a Central St Martins student, an unaddressed case of body dysmorphic disorder, a pair of stereo headphones (for your iPod), a blue Ikea Oyster card wallet, Adobe Creative Suite