Action!

This was a weekend of extremes.




The Le Corbusier exhibit at the Barbican Gallery was EXTREMELY thorough and inspiring and it made me miss Pittsburgh and my archie droogs so much. A lot of the pieces were on loan from Fondation Le Corbusier and they included postcards to his friends, sketches, plans, scale models, drawings, furniture, built art, paintings, and best part was that everything was in French so I had a little ticklish moment in the museum. Makes me yearn for Paris again, as does a certain message from a special friend. It was super cool to see how Le Corbusier translated his appreciation for utopian socialism into his design for the Centrosoyuz headquarters in Moscow, a design that was realized in 1928. All in all I kept making sex sounds because his works were so damn sensual and trippy and it was a mindgasm.

And the area where the Barbican Gallery is, in proper London, is SO WEIRD. It's like being in 1984, the book. Or the Soviet Union.

Then that night I shelled out 7 quid to see where the least attractive people in all of London (&maybe all of Great Britain) rub up on each other, where balding businessmen go to score poon. So gross. But I'm probably going to back there in May to see Clem Snide, so...

Anyway that was a bust, but Saturday was much better. First I met Lydia, Sarah, and Johanna at Broadway Market in Bethnal Green, a place I would not want to be alone at night. But I realized I like rundown sort of shady areas during the day because there are certain lonely elements that make for interesting images, such as:

After Broadway Market I went with Sarah and Jo to Primark at Oxford Circus. Big mistake. Worst timing ever; the place was like if H&M and Forever 21 did meth and got into a catfight. Nothing short of hell on earth. My anxious mess left after about 10 minutes.

Then in the evening we were invited to Martin/Anders's place for drinks, an outing (inning?) which inevitably finds us still at their apartment when the sun's coming up, Martin turning to me and asking, "Sooo what should we do? Should we go out? Get some bears?" This time the Norwegians were actually outnumbered! I met a Frenchman named Basil who said I had a great accent (merci) and an Italian named Mateo who actually had an American accent and was so typically Italian. As in, contentious, pompous, emotional, etc. However, he was a great singer and gave Martin a boygasm with his guitar playing. At 5 a.m. I ate a ton of egg whites and tried to make people jealous, but no one was really interested in the egg whites, just me.

Woke up at 1 to a text from Sarah so I met her on Brick Lane, where we accidentally went into a supersized opium den/coffeshop/bar. We ate burgers and lounged on the couches while the DJ played reggae and dancehall tunes from Jamaica. The event is formally called 100% Dynamite and the place, Cafe 1001.
After a while we got depressed from looking at all the gorgeous men and their slightly less gorgeous girlfriends. Makes me hate London a little bit and worry about how I'd make friends if I came back here to live/work. Oi vey.


Somehow I managed to exhaust every second of this weekend doing something enlightening or funny or just stupid, so London, cheers.

Note to self:
-Write this story
*Mistaken for something of monetary value, a suitcase full of film reels gets stolen from a departing film crew in Morocco. Filmmaker(s) return to try and get it back. Adventure!