late notice i know, but from 6.30 tonight, free screening of archive short films (seems to now be a regular part of the London film fest) in trafalgar square, this year all about transport.
http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff/events/outdoor_screening_in_trafalgar_square

wrap up warm now.

i keep forgetting to post this:

Tonight from 6pm: Free beer and food (for the first few i would guess) at the new bierkeller on Southwark St, Hop Exchange cellars, next to the newly located Hopbine.

http://www.london-se1.co.uk/restaurants/info/727/katzenjammers

i like this project: making useful and fun stuff from the Olympics site bright blue hoarding as the contractors are taking it down. http://superniche.org/2009/08/24/the-blue-fence-project/

also - a chance (if more tickets appear) to see the Kingsway subway, on until 8th November. http://measure.org.uk/measurenews.html

saw 3 exhibs last week:

Sarah Oppenheimer and Yuko Shiraishi at Annely Juda, very quiet when it's not a David Hockeny show... the piece of gallery floor, lifted, shaped, cut for views, looking a bit like some high-tech stealth aircraft, was rather good, wedged into the gallery. and a small maquette unfolded flat in a frame, showing the skeleton (although it was flat against the wall and looked like it should have been lifted away, like its life-size version). The Space Tea House was alright, in a way it should have been better, but it was in an airless gallery, isolated, when it seemed like it should have been installed on a rooftop (Annely Juda has some fine rooftop views) with the damp grey sky occuppying its wirey thin frame.

Castellani Flavin Judd Uecker at the Haunch of Venison - occupying bits of a ground floor wing and upstairs. i like the way those minimal installation pieces blur into the gallery - the round glassy CCTV camera in the corner, and the old lighting tracks in the ceiling, all getting absorbed into the work, no edges. There was a funny inbetween windowless room - just a small lobby between two other rooms, with open doorways into each - with green fluorescent tubes diagonally arranged on the wall (must've been a Flavin piece) which had the rather entertaining effect of making the rooms either side really pink. even when you know! brain - stop trying to white-balance the green! amazing really. and there's a funny little ping! when you leave and see out of the window and everything is normal again.

okay, lastly, Rosalind Nashashibi at the ICA. much better than i was expecting - good little incidental moments. a big room downstairs with a projection room in the middle and projectors facing 3 of the walls. peering into the projection room, what appears to be a leak or incidental reflection of the side projection, overlaid with the light coming through the fan bit (stripey), it must've been deliberate, a proper projection and a little one going the opposite way, but i couldn't work out or quite see how. starting with the glass window right infront of the projection lens tilted at about a 45degree angle though, perhaps. and the other two projectors played alternately, and while the other one played you could sit on the bench facing the non-projection - just a white rectangle painted on the grey wall, and watch the colours of the rectangle shift and change with the reflected light from around the room. Upstairs, an absolutely genius piece - so simple and perfectly executed. 16mm film of a woman, mostly seen from behind, walking around Southbank. not continuous, nicely edited, and with sound. plays as a continuous loop (here's the genius bit) on two projectors, projecting side by side. they weren't protected so it was as fascinating to watch the film wind diagonally across from one to the other, as to watch the projected film repeat perfectly and inevitably , never catching up, side by side. near the beginning there's a bit where the film judders and the projector rattles - must be something to do with the sprocket holes out of line - and of course it does it a few seconds later on the other projection. dunno why but that especially pleased me... worth seeing.

was getting rid of some old emails and came across this. don't know where it came from but it makes me laugh...



also, another thing that made me smile the other day i took a very meandering route from RAH to hyde park corner in the evening and went under the arch to the crossing over to Green Park. as i approached the crossing, a cyclist infront of me pressed the button that lit the wait sign. 3 came on - to the left for pedestrians, to the right for cyclists, and then about 8' up on the traffic light post, one for horse-riders. never seen a green horse-and-rider light up!

finally, a lovely day - warm, dry and sunny.

on thursday i went to Bexleyheath for a meeting. i always rather look forward to going cos there's a great bakery by the station... i've been to bexleyheath a few times before, and it was perfectly fine but unexceptional. i can imagine though, if thursday was my only impression of the place, thinking it was some sort of dream-like town lost in the hills of kent. for a start, it was sunny and hot, in the middle of a day that at either end was rainy and grey. and it was surprisingly busy, it didn't feel sad and forgotten, full of old biddies mostly, who seemed to all have rather recently styled old biddy hair-dos, sharp curls etc. everytime i stopped, say to look at the bus routes at a bus stop, someone would immediately ask me if i was alright, and where did i want to go. getting on the bus behind these chatty old ladies, i was surprised to see a young driver, smartly attired, including a driver's cap. when we set off he would call out "everybody hold tight!" and gave little announcements at stops. the passengers all said thankyou as they got off. next time i will get the name of the bakery. it's very nice. it has a dark brown canopy and inside a long glass-fronted counter. i had a ham salad roll (bit odd, they use a knot roll, and put the ham in the usual place, and the salad under the knot bit so it ends up quite stacked), a spicy, fairly soft gingerbread man (not my ideal sort - i prefer them denser and treaclier, but it was still very nice), an iced bun, and a really exceptional chelsea bun, for three quid. it is a little far to go just for buns, but if you're ever passing by...

when i was younger i used to hang out by river at the lock, where a young woman in a little hut sold icecreams in summer and cups of tea in the winter. i used to occasionally get hot chocolate dips - a soft ice cream cone dipped upside down into a little tank of melted chocolate for a second - then the chocolate would harden around the ice cream. amazing. she's still there in the hut, and last year i asked her about those and she said she hadn't sold them for years but people still asked her about them. i've never seen them sold anywhere else, but i can't believe they weren't - did anyone else have them? does anywhere still sell them?

places to buy ice cream, then:

from the hut by the lock, obviously (Jesus green)

Marine Ices by chalk farm tube - the lemon ice is amazing. i used to try and take an ice cream to primrose hill on a sunny afternoon, but it never worked, it's much further than i think... i've never eaten in there but i'd like to. they always seem to be having lots of children's birthday parties.

Scoop, between endell street and neal st in covent garden - proper italian stuff served with paddle. last week i had a rather dense pistacchio (in a good way, a bit like home-made ice cream often is), also it was brown rather than bright green and not too sweet, which the young man sculpted into two sort of horns perched on top of the cone (the smalls seem expensive but you get a lot) which refused to be licked into shape. then he accidentally asked me for "due cinquenta... i mean two-fifty" which was quite sweet. lasted all the way to bedford square!

the EAT under new bit at the royal festival hall sells the best soft mr.whippy/'99 kind of ice cream ever. i don't know why, it's just really really nice. it's unfortunately the only EAT i've seen that does it. naturallyif i'm passing i always try to make time for one.

Pizza Express, also on the southbank, the bit between the Globe and southwark bridge, also does surprisingly nice takeaway ice cream - the coffee is very good (but i'm off the coffee - boohoo), hazlenut and pistacchio also good, cookies and cream not very good. i'm going to try the fruity flavours next.

not to go out of your way for, but marks and spencer does quite a nice solero-type thing, and indeed all their takeaway ice-creams are £1, which is cheaper than you'll find a solero anywhere else. i'm always shocked by the price of Sparkles in the corner shop... watch out for their suspicious low-fat low-sugar things though...


that list i found tidying up, it reappeared again in the back of my diary, though i don't remember putting it there... i still haven't worked out what it was for or remember from when. another odd thing is that it's very very messy handwriting, and usually when i was making lists for tapes and stuff i would write them out quite neatly. all a bit of a mystery. anyway in a fit of not-boredom (i'm not, really, just enjoying my day off) i wrote it out:

( mystery list )


clearly i must have liked them at the time, funny thing is, quite a lot of those songs - i can't even remember how they sound.

http://alternativepress.org.uk/

on this week for all you indie zine, comics and book-arts types..

this was going to be a collection of stuff that i'm going to see in the next few weeks or so, but on current form, it might just be a list of stuff that you could see, if it's your sort of thing.

EXYZT, those crazy french activist-architects that brought you last year's Bankside Lido, return with the Dalston Mill (til 9th aug). as far as i can tell, it's just east of kingsland rd, north of dalston lane. open 2-10pm everyday, bar thurs-sun. the event that looks most interesting is EXYZT and celine condorelli in conversation, 2nd august.

as previously posted, current Hannah Barry Gallery exhibition Bold Tendencies III is installed in the top couple of levels of the Peckham Rye carpark (at the multiplex). complete with rooftop bar and gorgeous sunset views. til 30th sept, open 11am-10pm, Thurs to Sun.

some little installation things, called Tides and Times, at Southwark Cathedral,
Somerset House, and Southbank. with films by kids and stuff. not sure when it's on til.

the superstar pavilion - SANAA at the Serpentine - on til 18th october

now for the not-free stuff:

Richard Long at tate britain til 6th sept.

Walking In My Mind at the hayward til 6th sept.

Radical Nature at the barbican til 18th oct. last couple of things i've been to at the barbican i've been disappointed by the curating/installation/attitude. still, it sounds promising, and potentially rather relevant to next year's unit...

i haven't taken any photos since the weekend in suffolk, 5 weeks ago. i've hardly taken any for months really. i've been looking out of train windows at beautiful fields of poppies and not carrying a camera. i carried both the Leica and the pinhole yesterday to the exhibition opening, and didn't take either of them out of my bag. i just didn't feel like it. this is odd. at the very least i should get those half a dozen exposed films i have sitting around at home to Darkside...

wandered over to Muse-ings and there were a couple of interesting things there: this quite awful sounding "machine-learning based online system of computer-based prediction of aesthetic quality for color natural photographic pictures" http://acquine.alipr.com/ - at first it sounds like an interesting sort of project, but there are things there that just sound a bit wrong -
"A rule of thumb is that if the aesthetic quality of a photo is obvious to most people, it may not be worthwhile to seek Acquine's opinion on it because Acquine may choose to assign funny scores in such cases. Please be serious if you would like Acquine to help you.
yes. we have to take it seriously. no casual family photos, out-of-focus shots, political photos, news photos, and importantly, no "etc.". right...

betterly, although i'm not a big fan of the clean modern dystopian-ish social hardware observation stuff a la Andreas Gursky i like the look of this a lot - http://www.lynne-cohen.com/

ah, non-photo related, other than i spotted a couple in the last few days on lunchtime excursions in the sun, across the Thames, everything very photogenic and yet not feeling like take photos, http://www.streetpianos.com/london2009/ it seems like years ago i remember seeing the website for this before anything had actually been organised, about a single piano left on the street and the dream that it could be more than that, i think it's the same guy, and it's nice that he's made it happen.

oh wow, i just looked at Luke Jerram's page. brilliant. not sure this is the same guy as before now... but just amazing work. love the description to Black Cloud: "This 8 metre long black inflatable cloud was made for a sad friend to help cheer him up. We used meth burners to fly the cloud over Bristol. Unfortunately the cloud caught fire at 100ft, but the event did cheer my friend up. "

i was on a bendy bus at lunch time, and it got a bit stuck in traffic so i went to the front to ask the driver to let me off. as i walked between some seats the guy on my left sort of turned around in his seat and into the aisle to see what was happening and so me and my bag squeezed past the guy on the right a little bit. as i stood at the front of the bus that guy came up to me.. "Oi mate.." i turned to face him, he looks at me "oh. You're a bird. You brushed past me just now you see, i thought you were a geezer." and he sits back down. "oh, sorry about that.." i called after him half-heartedly.
now, the funny thing is i was sitting directly opposite him for the last 15minutes, and there isn't a lot of room on those buses so our knees were practically touching and he did look at me a couple of times. so that was a bit strange that i look like a 'bird' from the front standing up, but not from the back standing up or the front sitting down. and who goes to the effort of getting up to tick someone off for 'brushing into them' but doesn't say anything when it happens? very strange. i couldn't quite work out whether he was angling for an apology or trying to start a fight or what, but hey, apparently i get away with such rudeness by being female.

anyway, just browsing for the opening times of Arthur Beale, that unlikely chandlery shop in covent garden, and came across this article: http://www.timeout.com/london/shopping/features/287/Ye_olde_shoppes.html