D-MAN

Swallowfield

With the morbidly late sunsets these days it feels like the days are bleeding into the nights which bleed again into the day. The lines between one day and the next are so blurry, the bank holidays this weekend and all the late nights aren't helping either.

Have had extremely happy days for the past week or so. Went to Antwerp on a whim, visited Sam in Durham and came back to hang out with my best friends in London. For the last three years I have relied so heavily on these people for their comfort and company. I love that my best friendships are easy and kind and honest. Distance is easy because closeness inevitably leads to friction. I think it might be a matter of whether people are willing to endure that temporary awkwardness for the long term gains. After waking up to a frigid morning we brought lunch to the boys' flat in Regent's Park and spent the afternoon playing mahjong and talking about things like, dreams, fears, ambitions, hopes. What we think and what we don't think. We're all very different people, it's quite obvious, but whatever made us still led us together. It is a bit miraculous maybe.

I am so grateful that this sort of happiness is present in my life,I must not waste it or forget it. There are so many things to love in this world, how could anybody bear to, or dare to turn their backs on them? Or even worse, to not see them at all? 

That is the only thing which is truly and really sad.

In Pitch Dark I Go Walking In Your Landscape

It's weird walking around campus knowing that it has all ended. I don't know if I'm happier or sadder about it. Went for Slade's grad show yesterday evening great way to spend a Friday evening.

It feels like a lot of small worries are piling up in my head and preventing me from feeling intensely about anything. Or it could be just the dreams. But talking it out always helps especially the caffeine light-headedness induced type of talking. We were talking about how commitments make a person, and so it makes good sense for us to make certain commitments in our lives but in the end, the only commitments that count for anything and make you anything are only those that you didn't choose. Consciousness is all fog and mirrors.

I'm really going to miss my friends so much

La Familia

SOME OF THE BEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD

I seriously lucked out, my friends are fucking awesome. All we got is good times, from the beginning to infinity and beyond. They're always there when I need them, through the highs and the lows and everything in between. I love them all so much............ 

Guy Fawkes '11

4th November 2011

West End Girls

We are really lucky/lazy girls, spent the entire weekend going up and down Wardour Street in Soho, all over the W1 from Chinatown to Carnaby Street to Charlotte Street... We get around by deciding where to eat.

Ordinary mode of operation within Soho

roughly in order of distance from our flat, south of Oxford Street

ATMs, Tesco on Dean Street

Vietnamese: Cay Tre 

Udon: Koya

Korean: Arirang

Non-mealtime snacks/desserts: Princi

There are no seats in Princi: L'eto Caffe 

Cupcakes: NOT Hummingbird - go to Lola @ Topshop Oxford Circus

Drinks: Kettner's

Taiwanese/Chinese: Leong's Legend

Roast meats: Four Seasons 

Chinese Desserts/Trash Talking: Candy Cafe 

Singapore/Malaysian: C&R Cafe

The list is lame, so Asian but that's how we roll. Noodles and rice = homely comforts. 

Weekends are special, so on Saturday night we went to Wright Brothers' Soho Oyster House.

Dozen oysters, Crab cakes, Pork belly + clams

Surf + Turf: Steak + langoustines

If I were rolling in the deep I would do this more often.. oysters + steak + chocolate dessert (the chocolate praline pot is so magical, like eating Nutella out of the pot but classy). Tummies filled we headed off for the rest of the London night, starting from home and then moving into progressively blurrier space... finally ending with a 4am rickshaw ride back to Charlotte Place and getting tucked into bed by my lovely friends.

LONDON

I try to make a conscious effort to do fun things in London because these places and people are precious and therefore my limited time with them is precious. The photos here were taken over 2 separate days meeting friends on the weekends and stuff like that. I guess it's really self-indulgent but it's not like this whole website isn't anyway...

My room:

When I realised that this year is the only time in my 21 years that I've had my own room I felt a bit deprived but it's alright, I'll make the best out of it, wiping down the floors by hand with wet tissues and vacuuming every hour like a freak.

I like Zix's room too:

Coffee, Cake and Company:

The first Friday of reading week break I woke up in the afternoon and we talked to Bong on Skype for a bit until it made more sense to just meet halfway between our houses at Kaffeine.

The obvious thing to do after was to visit our favourite resident of Great Portland Street:

Came home and Xiu's friends were over so we all hung out in our kitchen:

Then we went to dinner at Hix, ate steaks and tried 3/4 of the dessert menu. The restaurant decor is quite hilarious and the tables are a little too big but everything was quite delicious.

All the neon tubes.. might have inspired this scene which happened two weeks later in my room:

Before going to Istanbul I told Xiu about it over pancakes and chorizo hash at Riding House Cafe, which is becoming the brunch standard here:

On Saturday we went to White Cube Gallery at Bermondsey to see Anselm Kiefer's show. Large monument-scale canvases, messy textures, every single type of rust imaginable, and a whole lot of Latin words in charcoal scrawls. Got creeps from the sheer dirtiness of the artworks but of course you're not supposed to regard high art in such base ways. X was pretty excited about the polished concrete floors, which are totally different from normal concrete floors. OK

Walked through random streets and housing estates towards Borough Market, appreciated the first peach blossoms of spring along the way:

Borough Market standards: Roast's pork belly sarnies, carrot+orange juice from the opposite stall, Posh Banger Bros, Monmouth Coffee and more...

Tacita Dean's video installation at the Tate Modern: good place to lie down on less than polished concrete floors

Score Settling: 

I love this artwork, it is part of No Lone Zone in the Level 2 Gallery:

Also included in the exhibition is Margolles’ Score Settling 2008, which responds to a series of murders committed by drug dealers in the Sinaloa region. Glass fragments, collected by the artist from shot-out car windscreens, are fashioned into jewellery resembling that typically worn by narcos, those responsible for the killings. The work evokes the memorial value of the vestige, and the glass fragments possess a haunting testimony to an absent body.

The write-ups in each class box were written in Spanish so it's not so obvious what the scores are, but the work is very interesting and beautiful regardless of its context. 

The funny thing is how I barely think about any of the things in these photographs except when I look at them. I might barely remember things if I don't document them somehow in writing or photography. And even though people and concepts can reinforce themselves throughout your life I think aesthetic objects, or experiences are really temporarily immediate to us because we can't move them or use them across different times and spaces as much as nonmaterial objects.