Monday, Aug. 12, 2002 - 1:06 p.m.
Kaboom! Art world gossip
I spent the last 20 minutes of Friday at work trying to stop the beads of tears in my eyes from flowing freely. Work, man - I've been complaining about it for 2 years but it finally hit the fan with enough shit-weight to make me get off my lazy fatbottom* and look for things with a conviction. Kinda. See yesterday for details*at least it makes Freddie's rocking world go round
So it's not every day that you get invited to a book launch and not every day that said book has your work in. And in an even smaller subset of that small subset, it is even rarer that you are in such a bad mood you couldn't really go to it. Even if it is in a cool place with guaranteed foxy men therein.
Instead, I went back to the manor with Jo and we went to drink wine in the local Portuguese/only restaurant. Which was nice. She told me I had to leave work. I agreed. Tool leftover pizza home (per-peri chicken, Yum Yum Yum) to eat for breakfast.
Saturday was spent spending £80 on a kitchen tap (I know!) and falling asleep in front of 101 Reykjavik which I think has faulty subtitles. He'd do a monologue in Icelandic which had no subtitles and then like 20 mins later (literally) a load of subtitles would come up when no one was saying anything. Unless was just going mental. Probably.
But Sunday was good. I had to get to Asda and back within a 25 minute time band, battling through the thick humidity and amassing crowds on route betwixt home and Asda. I made it. The crowds were amassing for the same reason the 6 of my friends were coming round - to watch two tower blocks at the top of my road being blown up. This made my third demolition, as having lived in Hackney for a while I was getting kind of fluent in Demolishish; I felt it was almost a settling-in present for me. Anyway. if you have never been to a demolition, I strongly recommend you lobby your local council to blow up some post-War fright blocks. (Unless you live in Coventry, where the entire fright-block city centre has been LISTED for some ungodly reason). They are much fun. They set off a pre-detonation charge thing, that we argued about whether it was to pre-warn roosting birds to nick off before they blew off, or to test the wind direction. (My vote was with the former.) And then it seemed to take an age before the buildings started collapsing, but when they did, they were gone in seconds.
Just a pile of rubble and white dust, and a lot of cheering from the people who used to live there.
I hope my Action Sampler sampled the action.
Apres, we had some apres-demolition chez moi: beers and crisps and houmous and Turkish bread and pizza. Mmm. And 6 other people in my little flat! A world record!
When they'd all sodded off, Jo and I went to the Whitechapel Art Gallery which was funny in itself, because ... and should I say this here? Yes why not. The main room is full of the work of this guy that Katey used to live with, Garold, who was a dirty perv and kept making her feel uncomfortable by doing such things as getting naked into his bed and stroking her leg with his foot while she was minding her own business and unawares that he was doing this. And now he's a saviour of British sculpture. Could so be gossip columnist of the art world. (OK well not me alone but I know people who could be ... and I could help them)
Yeah and then I painted half my kitchen, yay me, and have white paint spatters on glasses and in my hair.
Nice.