I love Shoreditch too. I love Soho. I love rioting students.
I love (particularly) the paint splattered Rolls that the parasite Prince Charles and the hag Camilla were caught in the other day by the ‘off with their heads’ militant protestors. hahaah.
I am really loving being home. It has settled something in me.
After my fuck session (which will do me for some time I might add) I wandered happily all over Shoreditch.
I stopped in at a number of cool looking shops: like the funky Japanese run clothes shop that sold padded linen overwear, the odd man’s pop up shop that sold Swedish soldiers head-gear and ‘vintage’ socks.
A shop that sells second-hand mens socks. Eww.
I dropped into White Cube and resisted calling Jay. The show was spectacularly lame. The entire space devoted to a 37 year old artist called Rachel Kneebone. Lamentations 2010 is the name of the downstairs show. Huge white porcelain tangled/mangled/reconstituted genitals on huge marble plinths set against slate grey walls..beautifully lit. The usual soulless, inchoate nonsense you might expect to find in White Cube. They reminded one..obviously of the Chapman brothers and their obsession with the dark, chaotic imagery of the unconscious.
Jay is already showing new artists who cannibalize existing White Cube artists. Apparently Kneebone is expressing the ‘trauma of death, loss and grief’ and shown differently these works might very well have achieved her aim but so elegantly displayed they had the guts knocked right out of them. I went upstairs to see the rest of the show but was told to leave as I had the dog with me. I wasn’t leaving the Little Dog outside so I left.
I wandered around. I met a man in the street who offered to blow me but I hadn’t showered that morning after a night of sex… I declined more for his benefit.
I found a wonderful shop called Labour and Wait which can be found at:
This charming store is really worth a visit. I thought, when I found the 1940’s lilac, enameled milk-boiling pot pictured below: Oooh, I thought, my friend Marilyn Phipps would like this.
As if by magic..who did I bump into today?
Marilyn Phipps!
Marilyn has the most wonderful home in Seasalter called The Battery.
The Battery, a nineteenth-century naval building, is a huge, bright blue, wooden house that sits right on the Whitstable beach and faces onto a 120ft secluded sea-front. The Battery is a shrine to Forties ‘utility’. The kitchen was put in during the Forties when the house was used as a holiday retreat for disadvantaged children.
Marilyn has carried on the Forties theme throughout the house. The two huge wooden doors between the dining room and kitchen were made in the Forties for Ramsgate post office. The kitchen walls are lined with teapots, sugar shakers, vinegar jars, and salt cellars.
A huge kitchen clock was bought locally and the chunky table was already there.
The Battery can be incredibly hard to keep warm. Marilyn solved her problem by installing an enormous wood-burner for the dining room. She painted it midnight blue, making it more abstract sculpture than functional heater…she calls it The Beast.
The Battery has a fascinating history and features in the book Wooden Houses. It was built as two big wooden sheds at the end of the nineteenth century. The first housed two cannons, the second was a drill hall for sailors, and during WW1 it was a convalescent home for wounded soldiers.
Marilyn still get’s people visiting who remember it from their childhood holidays in the Forties, saying they had the happiest time of their life here.
Wait! Did I tell you that they found a strangled woman in the room I was staying in at Soho House NYC? I can’t wait to stay there again.