lightness

there is really too much to be said, and i find it almost silly to attempt to say it all in a little post. but these are not meant to say everything, they are meant to give tiny glimpses of good and bad, sweet and sour, remarkable and ordinary.

or, if you would have it, lightness and weight. now about two weeks ago i fell into a pit of february depression, and the london landscape could do nothing to help me crawl out of it. everything was bleak, nothing could be fixed. i walked galore, drank galore, yet something was amiss. and then came vienna, and remarkably those days of dark were gone within an instant. and lucky me, the lightness that pervaded my travels has returned with me to london.

vienna. it began with bratislava, and a day in a post-communist city that was shockingly beautiful. well, at least the old city center. but once you exited the small walls of the fairy-tale town, you returned to the bare buildings with broken windows and sullen faces. but the food was cheap (ridiculous) and the slovaks were kind. but after a few hours, i was ready for the regal city of vienna. immediately after i arrived, dominik - a pure viennese that joyce met at some schmooze fest in shanghai - picked me up and brought me to his perfect home. a complete stranger, and he took me in for three days. remarkable. dominik is writing his thesis on free trade, he has already worked in singapore, bangkok and los angeles, and he is bound for america next year on a fulbright. he showed us the vienna that we would have never seen. on the last night, we happened to meet up with his old friend heinz, who is working for lomo. with him were the president and one of the founders of lomography. as i sat amongst these fascinating people, i felt out of place, like an observer who is not willing to expose anything about themselves, and therefore sits back, not part of that world but endlessly fascinated by it. and there was the language barrier - but it made it even more perfect. there was also the frightening bald middle age man, with the communist hat and the leopard scarf, who would have been fascinating if he hadn't been so terrifying. only interesting in retrospect, my stomach couldn't really handle his odd comments after drink five in the converted viennese brothel.

the next day we went to lomo headquarters. the office was laid back, filled with light, high ceilings, comfortable sofas, studios, and happy workers. heinz showed us the office, and made me understand more clearly the philosophy of the lomographers. there are these spectacular walls of photographs, or rather lomographs - just rows upon rows of photos, creating a collages that are impressive just because of their sheer magnitude. and the idea is that each little picture in these massive walls is taken by anyone, randomly, at the spur of any moment. natural. they have these four exposure cameras, that sort of allow for a bit of a cinematic effect through photography, with four images (obviously) that can catch a few movements etc. all i know, is the visit to "lomoland" and heinz and amira and all these people, made me want to know as much as humanly possible about this phenomemon of lomography. before we left they gave joyce and i a camera - i died of shock. it is a "fisheye" and it has a 170 degree high quality lens, but no real viewfinder. the idea is that you should not be looking at the viewfinder, but just taking what you see, spontaneously.

but even without the lomo experience, vienna was not the city of frightening nazis that my childhood fears expected it to be. oh silly american films. the highlight for me was first and foremost the coffee shops. in these shops, you sit all day reading and writing...they have newspapers on hand for customers, and comfortable chairs, and good lighting. there are modern ones and traditional ones -- all are the perfect place to read "the unbearable lightness of being," write postcards, or scribble in your travel journal. sort of dreamlike i must say. joyce and i sat in those cafes for hours, catching up on the past two months of our lives, furiously writing, occasionally taking the dramatically posed picture.

the other part of vienna that suprised me, were the museums. i was not quite aware of how much incredible art there is in that city. a mere english major, i cannot recite the specific wonders of the schieles and klimts that i saw, suffice it to say that i have still not quite recovered from such an inundation of great art. sadly, i was unable to attend the third man tour. this made me very upset, but i had a cafe at the cafe mozart. it was the most expensive double expresso of my life, and i cannot say it was worth it. but i sat there and dreamed of orson welles and harry lime. joyce and i also went to the opera, and again my movie fantasies were a bit hurt, as this viennese opera house was clearly not where amadeus was shot. and sadly we saw a highly salieri-esque opera, oh horrid.

i thought returning to london would be depressing, but instead i found that i had missed the city after my dreamlike week. i had truly snapped out of my melancholy state. as i walked the familiar road back to wren street and langton close i quickened my pace, excited to return to my familiar suite. london welcomed me with a bit of rain and a bit of fog, but this time such trivialities as weather would not drag me back to the february blues. today, as i walked home with groceries and other purchases in arm, i decided to go down a narrow mews instead of the industrial grays inn. the sun was setting, and all of the sudden nothing in london looked grey and old. it looked beautiful in its own way - no, not vienna - no, certainly not new york - but a subtle, brick beauty that i finally appreciated after weeks of bitterness.

who's afraid of virginia woolf?

well i am, for one. dear god. it has clearly become my pastime to sit in theaters and talk to old men when i am exhilirated by those players on the stage. old men and kate, sharing together in the delight. tonight it was the same, as i sat in my seat and floated above, filled with shock, horror, enjoyment, confusion. between the acts, the elderly man next to me seemed to know exactly how i felt, once again, and off we went bantering about this and that when really what we just wanted to get up and shout thank god it is so good. kathleen turner is a god.

but on the topic of virginia woolf, slightly, i suppose i should briefly explain the name of my blog. i don't know why i put it so idiotically, after all i have wanted to explain the silly name since i started the bloody thing, but yes. here i will unsubtley do a brief number.

dear ms. woolf wrote a short essay which i greatly adore about a london walk. in "street haunting" (read it, read it now -- it is much more worth reading than any of the words to follow), woolf chronicles her quest through the london streets to find a pencil, her perfect pencil. i will not be a silly twit and relay the details of the walk, because that is just boring. but after being here for a month, i can't tell you how true her opening sentence is: "No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner." now for me, recently, it has been more between my anguished addiction to lost and a pathetic piece of chicken that i attempt to cook myself around 8, but truly. it is as though during those hours i feel compelled to rush out my door and just go walking, god knows where. yes, i hate the early darkness, but there is something comforting about it in this city, knowing that you will come back home to warmth and familiarity after rushing about going absolutely nowhere for a few hours. the rushing about is clearly better than the coming home, but that's another story.

anyway, i have been haunting the streets of london, perhaps not as well as ms. woolf, but perhaps with as much enjoyment. i was lucky enough to have a familiar wanderer join me this past tuesday, when ms. libby mooers arrived in london on route to uganda, a much different locale indeed. after a quick runaround of the wagamamas and the big ben, libster and i sat down in green park next to the buckingham palace for a glorious joint, in the glorious sun, and she exclaimed : "KATE. do you realize, we are walking in a park in LONDON." and her face was beaming, and i said shit. yes, this is pretty remarkable, when you step back to think about it. as we searched for the tate in a hazed state, we asked a businessman for directions, and he whipped out a map from his briefcase. we found this absurd, and then came the tate, and it was difficult to take it all in. libby made me write down in her book the explination i had for the two pictures that "i" (iggy) put up on "my" (iggy's) facebook group: "the first one is the glory, the second is the scandal." i write it here so that it can be written in two books. this is not a book.

later that day i visited moses at oxford, and was somewhat shocked to see 20 year olds served food in a magnificent hall. a candlelit dinner, with a waitstaff to boot. i was reminded of my silly little catering job, and thought wow, but if i were serving these kids i would attempt to accidentally spill on their laps as much as humanly possible. of course i wanted to this for my catering job as well, but i have anger management problems. but also, rich british people are simply insufferable. no connection possible. oxford made me slightly confused, simply because in my mind it was the place where auden, where names of greatness sprouted everywhere, but everything seemed so dead. like, dead - stuck in the past. obviously there was a grotesque fascination mingled with the horror. and yet, it was utterly beautiful. but oxford was wonderful because moses was wonderful and concluded my day of intoxications with four shots of tequila and god knows what else, and then a long drunken conversation about how, well god knows what i can't remember a damned thing. but as "only connect" seems to be my thesis for everything in life these days, it was probably about missed connections and how much i love successful ones.

ah yes. i do hope that "who's afraid of virginia woolf" will actually snap me out of my lost daze. for the past week my brain has snapped in two as i have succumbed to my need to fall into a pit of obsession with bad television. the suitemates suggested it, the life fell apart, oh lost. oh lost. but no, i must get back on track, and i will. no more lost. well perhaps one more episode, but afterwards i will continue to see plays, intoxicate myself in parks, read anything and everything, destroy my lungs, understand british people, and haunt streets after dark.