My boyfriend plays video games for a living. I don’t get it. I really don’t get it. I mean, no offence to geeks, but aren’t games were for sweaty, socially-maladjusted 17 year-olds? In the interests of being a good girlfriend and for my own personal growth, I played Gears of War 2 while he was reviewing it. Here is the rather embarrassing video of that experience.
Guy and I went to the Princi Bakery yesterday for an amazing lunch. We discovered it during our Milan trip and were excited when we heard they were bringing their carby joy to London.
I don’t really think it has an equal in the capital. Most places selling baked goods are either focused on white bread ham salad sandwiches served up by a character that wouldn’t be out of place in an East Enders episode. If the atmosphere veers beyond bendy cheese then they tend to be very cake orientated. Princi however is a really sophisticated artisanal style bakery with all the style you’d expect from Armani than a place that sells pizza by the slice. Guy and I wound up having two slices each (too much!!) for a late lunch and then wandered around London for a while.
In true flâneur style we ended up having a very varied experience ranging from the sublime to the sub human. Stumbling across the extraordinary Sam Taylor-Wood exhibition at the White Cube in Mason’s Yard, Sigh was a video installation made in collaboration with the BBC Concert Orchestra. Essentially miming the act of playing their instruments the combination of the magically uplifting music with the instrumentless musicians was surreal. I was so entranced I made Guy sit through two runs of the video.
We also wound up playing dodgem cars at The Trocadero. It was my first and probably last time in that particularly dingy London institution. Vaguely resembling a panopticon with its hollowed out centre and very high levels of security, only with a myriad of grimy warren like holes filled with unwashed adolescents. If I ever plan to surprise Guy with arcade gaming ever again I can assure you it will be Namco rather than the Trocadero that gets my pennies.
Anyway, one round on the dodgems and we were out of that dingy arcade joint, just happening to stop by the Princi on the way home for one last shared slice of pizza and a bag full of baked goods to eat at home. My buttons are slightly stretched in the pizza photo, and I would hate to see what they would be like today after half a slice of tiramisu, a croissant and some brioche. I am a fat little piggy but feeling very satisfied.
Princi Bakery 153 Wardour Street London W1F 0UT
It seems as though the universe went out to get an answer my question of why exactly it is still important to experience the cultural equivalent of steak when there are more than enough Big Macs going cheap. The Guardian reported yesterday:
“A team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics claim that stories and their writers can do just as much as academics and policy researchers, perhaps even more, to explain and communicate the world’s problems. Fiction, they boldly venture, can be just as useful as fact.”
“The list of novels whose literary power is bound up with their power to push social change is potentially huge. Dickens, of course, is an obvious contender, as is Harper Lee with To Kill A Mockingbird.”
I haven’t read the full report, but I dare say they probably didn’t include Don’t Mess With The Zohan as an example of how art could heal the rift between Israel and Palestine.
As a child I developed this odd tradition with my father, which I think has turned into somewhat of a wider obsession, or maybe the obsession fueled the tradition, you never can tell with these things. Anyway, I defined an artistic movement called Crart or Crap Art. I’m not sure how it began but but it lived in the form of gifts to my father; gaudy, ugly looking bookmarks out of the offcuts of the the dance costumes my Mother used to make for me.
I would pick up the prime scraps of the glitter splattered lycras, the brightly coloured pane velvets and stitch them all together in layers, so that the different colours and textures would be revealed through strategically placed cutouts, finally adorning with them with fringing, sequins and sometimes a bit of iron on stiffening on the inside so that it would keep its shape. I would make these essentially as stocking fillers for father’s day and birthdays (I also gave him stuff he wanted, I’m not that cheap). Anyway they seemed to make him happy so I made quite a few of them.
But back to my my point, I think that my childhood interest in crart has lead to a fascination with camp, kitsch, cliche and badness in art in adulthood. I’m pretty proud of the fact that I’m one of the few people who weren’t paid to see Swept Away in a cinema (and also owns a copy on DVD), same with Crossroads and pretty much any other film starring a pop star. Why do I know all of the words to the entire script of Dirty Dancing? It’s certainly not because many any critics think of it as a great film.
I will actively go seek out films that people have told me are bad. I watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Don’t Mess with the Zohan in the last couple of weeks knowing full well that they were going to be terrible. Who could have ever imagined that a film starring Adam Sandler as an Israeli soldier who fakes his own death to become an ol’ lady banging hairdresser in New York could have been a bad idea?
My dirty secret is that I love Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, it is so cheap that the sauce is orange. I am so consumed by the shame of eating it that I can’t bring myself to cook prepare it while anybody else is in the house.
Maybe Crart is like junk food for the brain. If only there was some kind of way of developing brain-bulimia, where somehow my mind can puke out the crap I’ve ingested so that it can find space to be able to remember and quote intelligently from all of the very worthy books that I’ve read. Instead my natural response tends to be something along the juvenile lines of “farts.. Ha.ha.ha.” or worse.
Maybe if I ever decide to do my PhD or something I would study the impact and meaning of crart on the landscape of the collective consciousness. Exploring what demarcates the divide between high and low culture and what, if anything any of it actually means. Is there actually any moral imperative for preferring Proust over Pretty Woman? What draws people to the mental equivalent of junk food rather than haute cuisine? Does it even matter anymore?