06.07.02 Saturday
Expedition to Notting Hill Gate tube station where the Portobello Confederation is located. All (most) dealers use the same plastic bag to distribute to their customers, and there is the uncanny presence of an information counter. Specialties of every conceivable and ludicrous sort are here: Ottoman antiques, cigarette ephemera, fin-de-siecle lace and glassware. Prices uniformly huge. I spot the exact same frameless uncircumscribed magnifying glass (jade and silver according to dealer) which I bought for SGD 20, for GBP 20. Shooed out of countenance by draconian antique postcard-dealer after I disrupt his arcane classification system which I imagined I was respecting.
From the entrance of the antique dealer concatenation the colour series scheme of the toy-buildings is: bleached lavender, Yakult orange, rose-salmon, cyan, baby blue, cream, Baskin Robbins Daiquiri Ice, butter, cream, sailor blue, chalky grey, Bouillon Racine green, butter, capsicum red...
Our momentous lunch at the Ivy has all the mystique and privileged aura of a secret society congregation. The door bitch says not "this way please" but rather "please come through" - we have cleared the hurdle of actually securing a reservation. The atmosphere however is not terribly rarefied - clearly the preserve of Bright Young Things and old money, but the tables are abuzz with animated conversation, vitality, laughter. "Frank Lloyd Wright horizontality". Diamond lozenges of stained coloured glass in apparently aleatory mosaic. Insidiously comfortable, even cosy. We have I think the best table in the house, a bloated crayon:
[limitations of layout preclude the inclusion of my sketched diagram]
Wholegrain bread excellent, as is the ivy leaf-embossed pat of butter. Weekend lunch menu, GBP 17.50:
1. Plum tomato and basil galette/Minted pea soup
2. Veal chopped steak, fried egg, chips, tomato relish/Roast free-range chicken, sage-onion stuffing, crispy bacon
3. Lemon meringue pie/Vanilla amaretti ice cream, peach compote
Everything was excellent, the lemon meringue pie trumping all the tartes au citron I had; the chopped steak a dressed-down Ivy burger in casual garb, perfectly grilled, egg perfect - limpid diaphanous white, quivering yolk, perfect chips, fluffy vs. crispy (inside vs. outside), tomato relish a synthesis of English condimental quintessences to form a new whole - ketchup, Heinz's sweet relish (green sort), mustard, chopped tomatoes, parsley, onions. J's dessert is the best sundae I've ever had - freshly compoted peach of a blushing sunset shade. We drink sparkling Malvern (Schweppes), 3.50 per litre, plus cover charge ("main dining room") of 1.50 and two person tip of 6.00, I pay 24.00 for the historic package, every penny gloriously squandered.
Woman: Excuse me, could you tell me where the washroom is?
Waiter: (without gesture) It's upstairs, madam.
Woman: (hysterically physical) Upstairs? Where? (points flagrantly) There? (looking like a wind-vane)
Waiter: (strenuously and obdurately stony in his gestureless direction) It's upstairs, madam. Upstairs.
A quick peek at the National Portrait Gallery, then we choose Tate Modern (Matisse-Picasso) over Tate Britain (Lucian Freud). Exterior: a Legollection of bricks chosen carefully for variance in hue. Interior: in the Turbine Hall of Gothic altitude, Tiffany-blue boxes adhere to soaring scaffolds of steel - boxkites, blueboxing.
Rooms are airy and vacant of obstruction (discounting tourists), with a disturbing but not unpleasant smell of macerated fruit/apricot-prune cake in the still-life gallery. I am pleased to find Svankmajer's Dimensions of Dialogue on exhibition, especially the first part with the cannibalistic Archimboldo heads. "This civilisation eats everything. It eats nature, whole cultures, but also love, liberty and poetry and it changes these into the odious excrement of the society of consumption and mass culture." Another Modigliani Tete, this time a limestone sculpture. A Klimt of diaphanous beauty, Portrait of Hermine Gallia, faded gossamer glamour threatening to vanish like an apparition. Damien Hirst's Pharmacy feels like a set from Sleeper, a Disney day-glo medicinal superstore. Dare I admit that one of the Pollocks quite caught my eye? But no, I changed my mind. Mortifying section on Mondrian and De Stijl. Lots of ludicrous "conceptual art": Michael Craig-Martin's An Oak Tree (A Glass Of Water) being the grovelling low point. Visitors proclaim it a "humpty-dumpty approach to life" and "sort of pseudo-philosophical", while of Duchamp's Fountain, one witless American dame says "I like the white, that it's all white". Elaboration (unintentioned?) of Duchamp in the toilet where the sinks are exemplars of tacit gadgetry, draining by the side via a slight incline.
[again I regret that the relevant drawing must be omitted]
Expedition to Notting Hill Gate tube station where the Portobello Confederation is located. All (most) dealers use the same plastic bag to distribute to their customers, and there is the uncanny presence of an information counter. Specialties of every conceivable and ludicrous sort are here: Ottoman antiques, cigarette ephemera, fin-de-siecle lace and glassware. Prices uniformly huge. I spot the exact same frameless uncircumscribed magnifying glass (jade and silver according to dealer) which I bought for SGD 20, for GBP 20. Shooed out of countenance by draconian antique postcard-dealer after I disrupt his arcane classification system which I imagined I was respecting.
From the entrance of the antique dealer concatenation the colour series scheme of the toy-buildings is: bleached lavender, Yakult orange, rose-salmon, cyan, baby blue, cream, Baskin Robbins Daiquiri Ice, butter, cream, sailor blue, chalky grey, Bouillon Racine green, butter, capsicum red...
Our momentous lunch at the Ivy has all the mystique and privileged aura of a secret society congregation. The door bitch says not "this way please" but rather "please come through" - we have cleared the hurdle of actually securing a reservation. The atmosphere however is not terribly rarefied - clearly the preserve of Bright Young Things and old money, but the tables are abuzz with animated conversation, vitality, laughter. "Frank Lloyd Wright horizontality". Diamond lozenges of stained coloured glass in apparently aleatory mosaic. Insidiously comfortable, even cosy. We have I think the best table in the house, a bloated crayon:
[limitations of layout preclude the inclusion of my sketched diagram]
Wholegrain bread excellent, as is the ivy leaf-embossed pat of butter. Weekend lunch menu, GBP 17.50:
1. Plum tomato and basil galette/Minted pea soup
2. Veal chopped steak, fried egg, chips, tomato relish/Roast free-range chicken, sage-onion stuffing, crispy bacon
3. Lemon meringue pie/Vanilla amaretti ice cream, peach compote
Everything was excellent, the lemon meringue pie trumping all the tartes au citron I had; the chopped steak a dressed-down Ivy burger in casual garb, perfectly grilled, egg perfect - limpid diaphanous white, quivering yolk, perfect chips, fluffy vs. crispy (inside vs. outside), tomato relish a synthesis of English condimental quintessences to form a new whole - ketchup, Heinz's sweet relish (green sort), mustard, chopped tomatoes, parsley, onions. J's dessert is the best sundae I've ever had - freshly compoted peach of a blushing sunset shade. We drink sparkling Malvern (Schweppes), 3.50 per litre, plus cover charge ("main dining room") of 1.50 and two person tip of 6.00, I pay 24.00 for the historic package, every penny gloriously squandered.
Woman: Excuse me, could you tell me where the washroom is?
Waiter: (without gesture) It's upstairs, madam.
Woman: (hysterically physical) Upstairs? Where? (points flagrantly) There? (looking like a wind-vane)
Waiter: (strenuously and obdurately stony in his gestureless direction) It's upstairs, madam. Upstairs.
A quick peek at the National Portrait Gallery, then we choose Tate Modern (Matisse-Picasso) over Tate Britain (Lucian Freud). Exterior: a Legollection of bricks chosen carefully for variance in hue. Interior: in the Turbine Hall of Gothic altitude, Tiffany-blue boxes adhere to soaring scaffolds of steel - boxkites, blueboxing.
Rooms are airy and vacant of obstruction (discounting tourists), with a disturbing but not unpleasant smell of macerated fruit/apricot-prune cake in the still-life gallery. I am pleased to find Svankmajer's Dimensions of Dialogue on exhibition, especially the first part with the cannibalistic Archimboldo heads. "This civilisation eats everything. It eats nature, whole cultures, but also love, liberty and poetry and it changes these into the odious excrement of the society of consumption and mass culture." Another Modigliani Tete, this time a limestone sculpture. A Klimt of diaphanous beauty, Portrait of Hermine Gallia, faded gossamer glamour threatening to vanish like an apparition. Damien Hirst's Pharmacy feels like a set from Sleeper, a Disney day-glo medicinal superstore. Dare I admit that one of the Pollocks quite caught my eye? But no, I changed my mind. Mortifying section on Mondrian and De Stijl. Lots of ludicrous "conceptual art": Michael Craig-Martin's An Oak Tree (A Glass Of Water) being the grovelling low point. Visitors proclaim it a "humpty-dumpty approach to life" and "sort of pseudo-philosophical", while of Duchamp's Fountain, one witless American dame says "I like the white, that it's all white". Elaboration (unintentioned?) of Duchamp in the toilet where the sinks are exemplars of tacit gadgetry, draining by the side via a slight incline.
[again I regret that the relevant drawing must be omitted]
posted by D at 13:11
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